The Purgation State: Detailed National Factbook [READ ONLY]

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 10:31 pm

A Brief Overview of, and Introduction to, the History, Politics, and Culture of Le Royaume du Nettoyage de la Purgatio ("Purgation State")

Contents Page

- Summary Table
- Brief Overview
- Historical Developments
Historical Origins (1218-1823)
Modern History (1823-1934)
Rise of Purgation Fascism (1934-1988)
Consolidation of Power of PNL Purgatio (1988)
Road to Genocide of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel (1988-1999)
Royalist Restoration and Return of the Purgation Aristocracy (1999-2000)
Onset of Hostilities with Purgatio's Neighbours (2000-2009)
Recent Internal Developments and Social Problems in the Purgation State (2009-)
- Political Geography of the Purgation State
- Genetic Classifications in Purgation Society
Les Enfants du Ciel (637 households only) (<0.0001% of all Purgation households)
Génétiquement Mélangé (2,500-4,000 households) (<0.0005% of all Purgation households)
Génétiquement Sain (~84-86% of all Purgation households)
Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel (~14-16% of all Purgation households)
- Economic Structure and Social Stratification in the Purgation Social Order
Upper-Class (~1-2% of all Purgation households)
Middle-Class (~19-24% of all Purgation households)
Lower-Class (~59-65% of all Purgation households)
Under-Class (~14-16% of all Purgation households)
- Legal System and Due Processes in the Purgation Jurisdiction
Ultimate Rule of Recognition (Le Principe du Chef)
Sources of Law (Primary and Secondary Legislation) and Branches of Government
Unified Judicature, Judicial Hierarchy, and Common Law Interpretivism
TECON-TECAT Parallel Tribunal Regime for Genetic Re-Classifications
- Society, Culture, and Religion
State Religion Mandatum Est (La Solution Finale: Geneviève Aumont's 'Little Blue Book')
Nature Personified as 'Trinity Goddess' (La Nature: Karioleur; Elosthérenée; Porthiarâté)
Founding Myth of the Burgondis (The Tale of the Vannageux War: Seviathane v Malheuse)
Social and Cultural Conservatism (Key Socio-Cultural Stigmas of the Purgation Community)
Additional Reading: Academic Excerpts

- The Tangled Cultural Connection Between Race, Class, and 'Genetic Classification' in Fascist Purgatio, by Professor Karlijn VAN DER HOFF of the Visserien Vrijstaat
- Rise and Return of the Purgation Aristocracy: Commentary on Reactionary Politics and Feudal Nostalgia in PNL Purgatio, by Professor Gabriël VAN WEES of the Visserien Volksrepubliek
- Purgation Fascism: A Case Study in False Consciousness, Cultural Hegemony, and the Aestheticised Defence of Rentier Capitalism, by Professor Kristian RYBÁRIK of the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia
- Judicial Conservatism and Administrative Traditionalism: How an Anti-Revolutionary Public Service Destroyed Liberal Democracy in Purgatio from Within, by Professor Ursula Maria SCHLEYER of the Freie Stadt Schwelitz
- The Inimitable Synergism of Stigmatisation and Appropriation: An Analysis of LGBT Treatment and Politics in Fascist PNL Purgatio, by Professor Laurence P. Irving NGUYEN-MITCHELL of the Animirian Federation

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 10:36 pm

Summary Table

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 10:42 pm

Brief Overview

The Purgation State is, officially, a unitary absolute hereditary monarchy and, in practice, an autocratic, fascistic, one-party dictatorial state, with its politics and governance being dominated by the Purgation National League (PNL) (or La Ligue Nationale de la Purgatio (LNP)), and ruled and administered in accordance with that party's authoritarian eugenic, genetically discriminatory, socially Darwinistic, biologically deterministic political philosophy, known as Mandatum Est (or 'The Mandate', in reference to 'The Mandate of Nature'). The Purgation State's sovereign territory consists of a landmass of around 871,467 km², in which approximately 1.71 billion persons reside. On the frontiers of the Purgation State's sovereign territory are seven former nations which are presently 'occupied territories' de facto controlled and administered by the Purgation State, whose claims thereto are not recognised by the international community at large. The seven Occupied Territories together consist of a landmass of around 86,422 km² with a combined population of about 670 million persons between them. The Purgation State also presently controls the disputed border regions of Meurthe (13,119 km²), Lilian-en-Alagnon (9,916 km²), and Charenne-du-Sud (11,823 km²).

Consequently, in total, the Purgation State exerts control over a landmass as large as 992,747 km², with its central government in Auxiliora exerting its authority over approximately 2.38 billion persons, situated on the wider continent of Villalmeyda, bordering the Straits of Moñico to the north, the Sea of Vasconia to the west, the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia to the east, and the Animirian Federation to the south.

The country's official capital city is the historic and cultural centre of Auxiliora in the District of Burgundy, situated in the Purgation countryside and home to only 1.8 million residents, but which plays host to over 55 historic sites of immense cultural importance, associated with the Valois kings and queens of the past, including the world renowned architectural wonder of Le Palais du Million des Verres-Brisés, the former designated palatial retreat of the Valois royals and now the present residence of the nation's reigning dynasty, De La Fayettes, and which has also been designated as a World Heritage Site. However, the unofficial nexus of the country's commerce, politics, and business, is the city of Ravaliér in the District of Montfauçon, home to over 34 million residents and housing all important governmental buildings, including the Presidential Palace of the Magnificus Dominus, the building of the Purgation National Congress (PNC), the party headquarters of the PNL, the Supreme Court of Cassation of Purgatio (or La Cour Suprême de Cassation de la Purgatio), the headquarters of the PNL Inquisitorial Committee for Order and Security (PICOS) (or La Commission Inquisitoire pour l'Ordre et la Sécurité de la LNP (CIPOS)), the Purgation Institute of Genetic Cleanliness (PIGC) (or L'Institut d'Hygiène Génétique de la Purgatio (IHGP)), and the headquarters of the unified command structure of the Purgation Armed Forces (PAF), amongst others.

As such, it is often said that while Auxiliora is the nation's de jure capital and its historical and cultural centre, Ravaliér is the country's de facto capital where the nation's politics, law, governance, business, commerce, media, and modern technological and cultural affairs congregate and develop. In fact, Ravaliér was the country's capital city until as recently as 1999, when it was changed to the seat of the ancient royal residence, Auxiliora. Other major urban areas include Savoy-Ducasse (home to the prestigious University of Savoy-Ducasse), Pétrus (home to the famous University of Pétrus), Avidité (which hosts the Avidité Stock Exchange and the headquarters of all major financial institutions in the country), Provence (being the second-largest municipal economy in the country, after Ravaliér), Poisson (the epicentre of the nation's fishing, maritime trade, and its shipping, freight carriage, and containerisation industries), and Limogens (which hosts the powerful appellate body over all of Les Tribunaux Extraordinaires pour la Conservation de l'Organisme National (TECON), namely, Le Tribunal Extraordinaire de Cassation aux TECON (TECAT)).

The country's official languages are Purgation, French, and English, with Purgation being a Gallo-Romance language which may broadly be understood as one of many medieval precursors to the modern French language and which, today, has evolved to resemble more of a dialect of the French language than a separate language in itself. The most common language spoken by Purgations is Purgation, whereas the most common language used in writing, especially for matters of official business in law, politics, academia, and commerce, is French, followed closely by English.

Since 1999, the country's head of state has been the nation's absolute monarch, Le Grand Roi de la Purgatio, and since 1988, the country's head of government has been the Exalted President of the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus, with both offices presently being held by the same occupant, namely, Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette. The country's official State religion, Mandatum Est, is also the governing philosophy of the PNL and all public institutions. It is estimated to be professed by approximately 50% of the citizenry, constituting the nation's largest religious group, followed by Purgation Catholicism (33%) and No Religion (17%).

The Purgation State is a member of several multilateral international and interregional organisations, inclusive of the World Assembly (WA)'s General Assembly and Security Council, the Global Trade Organisation (GTO), the Interregional Infrastructure & Investment Banking Organisation (IIIB), and the International Intellectual Property Organisation (IIPO). It has a high Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of US$35,812, a medium Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.698, and is one of the world's largest exporters of pharmaceutical products, medical devices, genetic therapeutic products and materials, agricultural chemicals and biotechnologies, industrial gases and chemicals, and microchips and other electronic components.

However, it is also one of the most socially and economically unequal countries in the world, with a Gini coefficient of 67.4 and with over 27% of the population living on less than US$6.85 a day, despite the country's high mean average annual household income of US$65,786 (with the mean annual household income being much higher than the country's median annual household income of just US$19,411). It is also estimated that the wealthiest 10% of Purgation households own around 81-85% of the country's wealth, and that the top 0.1% wealthiest households in the country own more wealth than that of the bottom 90% of households combined. Moreover, despite the nation's high mean average life expectancy of 84.61 years, that figure varies widely between individuals based on their socio-economic status, with the bottom income quintile having an average life expectancy of only 71.13 years, and with the highest income quintile enjoying an average life expectancy of 91.96 years.

The Purgation State also ranks poorly on all international indices and measurements of democracy, transparency, human rights, rule of law, official corruption, press freedom, religious freedom, ethnic equality, and is widely deemed to be engaged in the perpetration of crimes against humanity and an ongoing genocide against residents classified as 'genetically disordered' or Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel (constituting an estimated 14-16% of the population), with the nation standing accused of committing such crimes as mass murder, extermination, summary execution, enslavement, forcible transfers, unjust imprisonment, torture, forced sterilisations, enforced disappearances, and unethical human experimentation against all or some members of that class, and thereby facing widespread international condemnation for such grave violations of both treaty and customary international law, ever since the PNL party's takeover of the Purgation State's governance in 1987-1988.

With the number of persons presently imprisoned in the nation's over 49,000 concentration camps (officially referred to as 'liquidation facilities' or 'des facilités de liquidation' by the current government) being estimated as somewhere between 338.33 million on the low end all the way up to 380.65 million detainees in total on the high end, the Purgation State's continuing persecution and dehumanisation of its 'genetically disordered' populace has often been characterised as the largest-scale ongoing genocide in the present day.

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 10:48 pm

Historical Developments

Historical Origins (1218-1823)

The historical precursor to the modern Purgation State is the Holy Kingdom of Purgatio (or Le Saint-Royaume de la Purgatio), founded in 1218 by Le Saint-Roi François I. Prior to the founding of Purgatio, the territory largely consisted of disparate warring tribes of various Frankish, Norman, and Gallo-Romance clans and peoples. The spread of the Catholic faith within the region played an influential role in enabling the religiously devout king of the Anjou peoples (previously organised as a loose confederation joining together 21 different Anjou tribal kingdoms since the Bretagne Conference of 18 November 741 and referred to by historians as Les Domaines et Règnes Anjousses), François Romain de Valois, to crown himself the first Le Saint-Roi. Through a combination of conquest, conversion, strategic inter-marriages, and diplomacy, Le Saint-Roi François I had organised the territory into an interconnected feudal network of duchies, principalities, free cities, counties, holy cities, and bishoprics by 4 March 1218, all swearing fealty and allegiance to himself and to all his heirs and descendants, as the one and only Le Saint-Roi, their liege, overlord, and sovereign.

The Holy Kingdom of Purgatio began as a highly decentralised, highly feudalised confederation of largely autonomous fiefdoms and demesnes, banded together only by their common vassalage under, and oath of fealty to, the Valois dynasty and the Purgation Catholic Church behind it. The polity would undergo a gradual process of political centralisation characterised by the concentration of absolutist state power under the Valois monarchy in Auxiliora, a process greatly aided and accelerated by the advent of mercantilist capitalism and industry-driven conquest and colonisation. From the early 1600s to the late 1700s, the Valois kings embarked on a project of sponsoring the invasion and subsequent commercial exploitation of all neighbouring territories, under the auspices of the Royal Trading Company of Valois (RTCV) (or La Société Commerciale Royale de la Couronne Valoise (SCRC)) which operated under the highly profitable industrial monopoly of a royal charter.

Driven by forces of industrialisation and mechanisation, and sparked by the economic and technological advent of the 'steam age', the country's new financial and mercantile elite pressured the Valois crown to fund expansionist wars and exploitative military endeavours, in a frenzied search for new markets, cheap labour, and raw materials alike. Le Saint-Roi Henri III agreed, on the condition that the expansionist industrial project occur strictly under the auspices of an exclusive privilege of the Crown, with the project's overall direction - and the profits therefrom - to be predominantly controlled by the Valois dynasty. So it was that the RTCV came to be constituted in 1609. Its private mercenary army and navy proceeded to blockade, invade, and occupy Purgatio's various neighbours, carving out the seven RTCV possessions and dominions of Stratford, Koháry, Esterházy, Lascelles, Cholmondeley, Arenberg, and Boisschot. These seven colonies were regarded as properties of the RTCV, and were governed with an eye solely towards maximising the profits of the company. RTCV Governors imposed trading monopolies upon each dominion, forcing the inhabitants to import finished products, and export raw materials, solely to and from the Purgation homeland and exclusively through the RTCV and its officers. High taxes were levied on the local populace, especially the rural peasantry and industrial working-class. The exploitation and excavation of local raw materials and resources was facilitated by a system of inféoder, a bond of indentured servitude imposed upon the most impoverished of workers and farmers and their families, who may have found themselves unable to fully pay their debts and taxes to the company, for one reason or another. Such debt-bonded servants found themselves being transported across the RTCV's empire, not only to other colonial dominions and possessions, but also to RTCV-owned factories, plantations, and work-houses in the Purgation homeland itself.

In addition to maintaining RTCV control over its possessions and dominions, the RTCV's mercenary military also engaged in a series of invasions of two of Purgatio's more powerful and industrialised neighbours, the Kingdom of Stulitia and the Animirian Empire, which often ended in stalemate, but with RTCV victories also frequently successfully extracting diplomatic and economic concessions from the Stulitian and Animirian monarchs, including the payment of war reparations and tribute, and preferential trading agreements requiring the Stulitian and Animirian crowns to purchase and import designated quantities of RTCV goods. The RTCV's successes in the 1600s and 1700s precipitated a shift in Purgation society, a gradual transition from a primarily feudalised, regionalised, largely rural and agricultural society to an industrialised economy in which power and authority was increasingly centralised and concentrated in the Valois crown, and more specifically, in the hands of the RTCV to perpetrate its various military and economic endeavours.

From the RTCV's founding in 1609 to its winding-up in 1798, the company's numerous expansionist and colonial endeavours greatly enriched both the RTCV and the Valois crown. The commercial successes of the RTCV, however, did not translate into material benefits for all segments of the Purgation populace. As at 1760, over 80% of the Purgation population still belonged to the rural peasantry, with a substantial proportion thereof labouring under an exploitative system of serfdom, and with most to nearly all peasants producing only just enough grain and wheat produce to pay off their tithes, taxes, rents, and other seigneurial dues. Meanwhile, more than 10% of the Purgation population belonged to the urban industrial working-class, with adults and children alike often labouring for 12-16 hour shifts for seven days a week in dangerous and unsanitary factories for subsistence wages only.

Instead, the RTCV's commercial successes would largely benefit a far smaller segment of the populace, creating an economic structure that resembled the model of a rentier economy. In addition to the Valois crown, which extracted roughly 10% of the RTCV's profits as a condition for extending the exclusive privileges and prerogatives of its royal charter, the company's profits generated millions in dividends for its shareholders annually. As at 1760, however, more than 90% of its associés belonged to fewer than 600 noble households, drawn from a Purgation aristocracy that constituted approximately 1-2% of the Purgation population as a whole, forming an elite 'class within a class' that benefitted richly and handsomely from the RTCV's military and colonial endeavours, even as the remaining bulk of the rural nobility and landed gentry lost much of their social clout and political influence as the country's industrialisation and modernisation diminished their relevance within a society that had grown less agrarian, less feudalistic, and less decentralised as a whole over time. In addition, the RTCV's successes gave rise to a new moneyed elite in Purgatio, composed of merchants who traded with the RTCV, financiers who extended credit to the RTCV and owned and purchased its bonds, as well as the more well-paid and well-remunerated officers engaged in the upper ranks amongst the RTCV's 2-3 million employees (at its height), that constituted the company's professional, managerial, and executive class, creating a new wealthy urban bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie which constituted an estimated 3-4% of the Purgation population, as at 1760.

However, the RTCV's economic model of indentured servitude, conquest, mercantilist trade, and exploitative resource-extraction, proved to be a most unsustainable one in the long-run. The Animirian Empire ended all preferential trade concessions previously ceded to the RTCV by 1757 and the Kingdom of Stulitia followed suit in 1759. Several attempts by the RTCV to re-establish its preferential commercial relationship with both monarchies by way of military force in 1760-1761 ended in abject failure, leaving the RTCV in a parlous financial state and its military and commercial reputation hard-hit and battered as a result. A series of nationalist revolts were ignited in the seven colonies lasting from 1764 to 1769 and which ended in the de facto independence of all seven propriétés once RTCV mercenary forces had lost all definitive control over the outlying territories. Having regained their independence, Purgatio's neighbours instituted a policy of 'free trade', moving swiftly away from the RTCV's mercantilist trading system and eliminating all of the RTCV's preferential trading conditions.

With its mercenary army and navy virtually non-existent, and having lost its access to the raw materials, indentured labour, and captive markets of its former colonial dominions, the RTCV's one remaining asset of value was, of course, its royal charter from the Valois monarchy, which gave it a complete monopoly over all of Purgatio's external trade with foreign markets. This allowed the RTCV to charge exorbitant rates and fees for all merchants and traders seeking to export Purgation goods or import foreign goods into Purgatio from abroad, charges which underwent a number of steep increases and mark-ups from 1769 to 1771, in a desperate attempt to recoup the losses the company had sustained from the recent failure of its foreign military adventures. This somewhat mitigated the sharp decline in the RTCV's revenues from the loss of its former empire, in appeasement of its aristocratic associés and its various patrons within the Valois dynasty, but sparked immense outrage and anger amongst the urban bourgeoisie, with many merchants and traders resorting to illegal black-market imports and exports to avoid the RTCV's exorbitant duties and in an attempt to break the RTCV's royal trading monopoly. Given the sheer levels of demand for alternatives to the RTCV, the royal government proved completely unable to shut down this black market or stem the tide of illegal goods being smuggled into and out of Purgatio and to her neighbours without the RTCV's consent or the sanction of the Valois crown, in brazen defiance of the authority of La Trône de la Pivoine.

The RTCV finally lost its trading monopoly in 1775. The debt-ridden and fiscally-unstable royal government, desperate for cheap low-interest credit to service its loans, was effectively at the mercy of the country's biggest lending institutions and, by extension, the moneyed bourgeois financier class, which leveraged that influence to extract one key demand: an end to the RTCV's monopoly on Purgatio's external trade. On 2 August 1775, Le Saint-Roi Jean IV signed a royal edict auctioning off a slew of six new royal charters on the open market, licensing its holders to freely import and export goods in direct competition with the RTCV. The number of royal charters would climb in the ensuing years to fifteen in 1778, twenty-eight in 1780, and thirty-six in 1784, as an increasingly parlous and cash-strapped Valois monarchy found itself being forced to auction off more and more trading licences simply to service the climbing interest payments on the Purgation crown's growing debts and liabilities, in a series of increasingly desperate attempts to keep the royal coffers afloat. As its monopoly evaporated and dissipated, it was not long until the RTCV would go bankrupt and have to be involuntarily wound-up on 23 March 1798.

The collapse of the RTCV was only the beginning of the troubles besetting the Valois crown, which soon found itself on the receiving end of two military invasions by its neighbours which resulted in Purgatio's resounding defeat, those being the Second Purgation-Stulitian War of 1798-1799, which resulted in the Stulitians seizing and occupying the border region of Meurthe, and the Third Animirian-Purgation War of 1809-1811, which ended in an armistice that required the Valois crown to pay hefty and exorbitant war reparations to the Animirian imperial government and cede the border territories of Charenne-du-Sud and Lilian-en-Alagnon to the Animirian occupying forces. Both wars were extremely costly for the Valois monarchy to wage and defend, requiring the crown to borrow millions to fund costly military endeavours which ended nevertheless in defeat, and so the Valois crown's already parlous fiscal state would grow ever more desperate still. Moreover, the Purgation monarchy relied upon an outdated and archaic feudal system of taxation to raise revenues, from which all feudal and seigneurial dues raised from any lands enfeoffed from the crown - and, by extension, the wealth and income of the entire Purgation nobility and aristocracy as a class - were exempt. Instead, the Valois kings were forced to raise revenues to repay their massive debts and growing interest rates by raising the Crown's dues levied upon imports, exports, and the sale or transport of typical goods and commodities such as salt, sugar, cheese, coffee, tea, and textiles, and increasing the scale and quantity of grain requisitions upon harvests and crop yields in the countryside, which was a disproportionate burden to be borne by the peasantry and industrial labourers. And the most unpopular of these royal levies was the capitation or 'head tax', a fixed charge levied upon every member of one's household irrespective of income or means, and from which the Church and landed nobility were also exempt. It also did not help that a significant proportion of the Crown's revenues throughout the 1600s and 1700s was, of course, derived from the RTCV's profits, meaning that the collapse of that enterprise forced the royal treasury to institute sharp hikes and rate increases across-the-board on nearly all such royal duties and levies, or risk bringing the Crown to the brink of financial ruination and default.

To make matters worse, a particularly brutal winter in 1811 resulted in a series of crop failures and poor harvests across large swathes of the Purgation countryside, and by the close of 1811 and the start of 1812, the country was in the midst of a serious grain shortage, and prices of bread, wheat, and flour more than quadrupled from the year before. Peasant revolts broke out in the rural municipalities of Limogens, Provençal, Lyons, and La Roche, rebelling against the large-scale grain requisitions by the landowning class and the unaffordable seigneurial dues and feudal taxes levied by the rural nobility and landed aristocracy in the midst of catastrophically poor yields. In the inner cities and the concentrated urban centres of Ravaliér, Avidité, Poisson, and Provence, violent strikes and riots broke out amongst the urban poor and the industrial labouring class, who began looting and rebelling en masse in the face of severe famine, hyperinflated food prices, and recent sharp hikes in the rates of a whole series of royal duties and taxes levied upon basic goods which collectively imposed a disproportionate and regressive burden upon the industrial working-class in the process.

The young Le Saint-Roi Charles XI, who ascended to the Peony Throne (La Trône de la Pivoine) on 4 May 1810 at the tender age of just sixteen, responded to the urban riots with overwhelming force, ordering the royal mercenaries to fire indiscriminately into the large crowds assembled in the streets of Ravaliér, culminating in an infamous massacre on 17 January 1812 known as Le Jour des Boulevards Écarlates à Ravaliér, in which an estimated 70 individuals lost their lives and thousands more were wounded. The urban rioters were dispersed by heavy deterrent force, clearing the streets of Ravaliér, Poisson, and Provence, in fear for their lives.

What followed in the next decade was the enactment of a slew of politically repressive measures by the Valois crown, designed to systematically root out and punish dissidence and sedition with extreme prejudice. In 1812, the monarchy's Conseil d'État du Roi enacted a fresh edict that established a secret police force, known as the Sacred Order of St. Troyes (SOST) (or L'Ordre Sacré de Saint-Troyes (OSST)), vested with extraordinary powers to establish a network of spies and informants throughout all major cities and densely populated municipalities throughout Purgatio, and were authorised to employ a variety of extreme methods, including random searches of private homes without warning, entrapment tactics, blackmail, torture techniques, extrajudicial killings, and forced disappearances, to identify, punish, and ultimately silence all traitors to the Valois monarchy. Persons found guilty of propagating 'treasonous material' or 'seditious libel' against the Valois king and his servants and councillors would suffer swift retaliation, from the revocation of their publisher's royal charter, to their immediate ejection from any feudal guild or association they may belong to, and prosecution before the robed judges of the notorious 'Crown Chamber of Valois' which was famous for generously doling out sentences of death, exile to a penal island, or indefinite detention to any persons convicted of 'offences against the monarchy', including and especially those found guilty of the offence of lèse-majesté by visiting scorn, contempt, and/or ridicule upon either the institution or personage of the Crown and all her deputies and representatives.

As for those peasants who had revolted or been engaged in civil disobedience in the Purgation countryside, they too were unable to escape the spectre of State repression, although the nature of the political and social persecution they faced was of a more decentralised and feudal character than that in Purgatio's urban city centres. Local Catholic dioceses and bishops established 'holy councils of inquisition' with the purpose of investigating and rooting out persons committing a whole slew of crimes against the Church, including blasphemy, sodomy, apostasy, adultery, heresy, vices, sexual immorality, and the broad offence of 'displays of irreverence towards the vicars and/or proxies of the Lord' - in other words, any disrespect shown towards clergymen and nobles. In addition to persecuting religious and sexual minorities, these 'holy councils of inquisition' functioned as organs of regional or provincial control, attempts by feudal lords and priests to reassert their control over local rural communities in the face of widespread peasant revolts and growing instability in the countryside. Given the prevalence of devoted Catholics amongst the Purgation peasantry, these 'holy councils of inquisition' were able to effectively rally the devout and assemble the faithful into serving the interests of local feudal rulers by promising to dole out 'indulgences' in exchange for services rendered to local inquisitors, including and especially spying on neighbours, reporting religious offences to the authorities, and giving evidence and testimony before inquisitorial proceedings which were favourable to the interests of clerical and/or aristocratic prosecutors.

Throughout this period of royal, aristocratic, and clerical repression, which lasted from around 1812 to 1823 (often referred to as La Terreur Blanche et Bleue), historians have estimated that anywhere between 48,000 to 53,000 persons were executed - whether through officially pronounced death sentences, summary executions, or extra-judicial killings - and over 500,000 others had faced persecution, prosecution, and/or imprisonment for real or perceived acts of treason, sedition, and libel against the prevailing institutions of the Crown, Church, and aristocracy.

Such measures may have had the temporary deterrent effect of quelling and quieting the rioting and rebellion that had broken out in the city centres and the countryside alike, but they also sparked a renewed backlash amongst liberal associations and organisations which espoused the values and ideals of the 'Age of Reason and Enlightenment' (or L'Ère de la Raison et des Lumières), principles such as egalitarianism, human dignity, civil liberties, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of conscience and religion, limited government with constitutional restrictions upon state power, rule of law, amongst others. Liberal organisations discussing and preaching the ideals of the 'Age of Reason and Enlightenment', such as Le Club des Alorsnoires and La Société Amicales des Pieronaises, had existed since the mid-1700s, composed largely of bourgeois members of the gentry-mercantile elite and self-employed professionals, journalists, freelance writers, philosophers, academics, and other such educated denizens of the academic-literati class of society. However, a decade of harsh political repression of anti-monarchical dissidence at the hands of the royalty, nobility, and clergy incensed the broader bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie in particular, resulting in the spread of intellectual liberal 'Reason and Enlightenment' ideas of the Alorsnoires and Pieronaises, further radicalising these groups which began to meet in secret to plot the overthrow of the Valois monarchy itself. In the densely populated urban areas of the country, such as in the city centres of Ravaliér, Poisson, Provence, and Avidité, bourgeois 'citizen militias' began to form, loosely banded together under a unified leadership which termed itself the Army for the Liberation of the Purgation People (ALPP) (or L'Armée Populaire pour la Libération des Purgations (APLP)), and helmed by two notable liberal intellectuals in Ravaliér at the time, Bernard Auteuil (the youngest son of a prominent banker and financier in Avidité) and Gérard Marceau (the eldest son of two commercially successful shipping and carriage underwriters in Poisson).

Due to the growing discontent of the Purgation populace, in the wake of multiple famines, unaffordable and regressive royal taxation, and inflated prices for a whole array of basic goods and commodities, neither the repression of the SOST and the Crown Chamber of Valois, nor the brutalities and scrutinies of the feudal provincial 'holy councils of inquisition', were able to fully stamp out the revolutionary meetings of the Alorsnoires and Pieronaises or the formation of the ALPP and various bourgeois 'citizen militias' in 1821-1822. Eventually, after months and years of planning, meeting in secret, spreading revolutionary propaganda throughout the populace, and the stockpiling of goods, weapons, and explosives, the ALPP launched a series of attacks upon royal institutions across the concentrated urban areas and inner city centres, launching its opening salvo with the armed takeover of the SOST's headquarters in Ravaliér on the morning of 16 January 1823. Forces and factions loyal to the Valois crown were completely subsumed and overwhelmed by the flurry of assaults and armed attacks launched by the 'citizen militias' coupled with their combined inundation of acts of harassment and interdiction. Within mere months, the most populous cities of Ravaliér, Avidité, Provence, and Poisson, were completely under the de facto control of the ALPP and the occupation of its local municipal 'citizen militia'. The near-bankrupt Valois coffers could hardly afford the funds needed to raise an army or even pay its existing mercenary forces, many of whom quickly left the country and abandoned the monarchy to its fate.

With the royal mercenary forces nearly entirely depleted and the crown's purse drained dry by 9 June 1823, Le Saint-Roi Charles XI had little choice but to sign the humiliating Treaty of Novelli with the ALPP's leadership on 11 June 1823. That agreement was a complete capitulation and surrender, with Charles Pierre de Valois agreeing to abdicate the throne, renounce the claims of all his heirs and descendants to the trône de la pivoine forevermore, spell a permanent end to the Valois dynasty for good, and transfer all formal state authority to the ALPP's Bernard Auteuil and Gérard Marceau in exchange only for a simple bare promise by the revolutionaries to permit him, his family, and his extended royal relations to leave Purgatio safely without harm, harassment, or execution.

The very next day, Bernard Auteuil would form the nine-member Revolutionary Consulate from the ALPP's leadership to govern the country in the wake of the Valois monarchy's defeat, which would proclaim a formal and official end to the Holy Kingdom of Purgatio (Le Saint-Royaume de la Purgatio) and thereby promulgate the birth and beginning of the new Republic of Purgatio (La République de la Purgatio) on 12 June 1823.

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 10:59 pm

Modern History (1823-1934)

The years of 1823-1835 would prove to be a most unstable and precarious period of Purgation history. In the immediate aftermath of the victory of the Purgation Revolution of 1823, the Auteuil-Marceau administration and the Revolutionary Consulate had to perform the Herculean feat of maintaining order and stability within a deeply-fractious and politically divided post-revolutionary Purgation society. Whilst the urban centres like Ravaliér and Provence were dominated by liberal intellectuals and petit bourgeois supporters of the roving 'citizen militias', it was a very different story in the rest of the country. The Purgation countryside, in particular, was rife with various counter-revolutionary forces who were stalwartly opposed to the revolutionary regime and its new capital city in Ravaliér - traditionalist royalists and monarchists in the old capital of Auxiliora, remnants of the old rural aristocracy and the landed gentry and their loyal vassals and servants in the old chivalric orders, former officers of the Crown police forces, former SOST enforcers and agents, and former Crown Chamber or regional inquisitorial prosecutors, magistrates, sheriffs, and bailiffs, and in particular, rural provincial clergymen and religious orders under the Church, alongside their most devoted and faithful adherents of the Catholic religion amongst the rural peasantry.

Swiftly upon its seizure of power over the country, the Revolutionary Consulate soon enacted a slew of sweeping reforms in 1823-1824 known as the 'Great Liberal Reformations', which included the abolition of serfdom, confiscation of church lands, disestablishment of the Catholic Church, separation of church and state, secularisation of schools, courts, hospitals, and other public institutions formerly controlled by the clergy, abolition of all blasphemy and lèse-majesté laws, revocation of all monopolistic powers of the old feudal guilds, establishment of a professional national standing army, abolition of feudalism and vassalage, abolition of all feudal aristocratic powers and privileges including powers to impose seigneurial dues or govern and administer fiefdoms, adopting a policy of 'free trade' with Purgatio's immediate neighbours freed from protectionist or mercantilist restrictions, and implementing market liberalisation measures, including and especially the revocation of any state powers to grant or refuse royal charters, exclusive licences, prerogatives, concessions, and letters-patent, amongst others. The Great Liberal Reformations proved highly popular amongst the urban bourgeoisie and especially the petit bourgeois supporters of the Purgation Revolution, thereby forming the core support base of the Revolutionary Consulate and the ALPP.

However, the Great Liberal Reformations also incensed and outraged traditionalist anti-republican monarchists within the country and worked to galvanise conservative counter-revolutionary segments of the Purgation populace, who began to rally together and take up arms and revolt in opposition to the new revolutionary government in Ravaliér. Anti-liberal, anti-revolutionary uprisings and rebellions broke out across the Purgation countryside, swiftly overrunning Limogens, Auxiliora, Provençal, and La Roche by 12 August 1824, overtaking vast swathes of the pastoral and rustic outlying provinces of the country, thereby bogging and wearing down the forces of the ALPP's new standing army across the nation in a draining process of attrition guerrilla warfare lasting for just over a decade.

Whilst the counter-revolutionary forces made swift gains across the agrarian countryside in the first year of the Purgation Civil War, in large part due to financial, materiel, and logistical support sent to the royalist rebels from Purgatio's neighbours and their aristocratic ruling elites, their progress quickly stalled as the anti-revolutionary armies were, in practice, ad hoc unorganised militias which were deeply divided geographically and politically. There was no unified command coordinating the overall strategy of the different militias, and little cooperation between each militia in each rural municipality, especially as the various factions which made up the counter-revolutionary side of the war were politically and ideologically distinct and were pursuing vastly different aims, from the restoration of the Valois crown, to the re-establishment of feudal privileges for the provincial nobility, to defending the interests of the Catholic Church, to protecting the segmental autonomy of the Purgation rural countryside from perceived radical impositions by the revolutionary government in Ravaliér, to foreign mercenaries whose loyalties lay with the monarchies and nobilities of Purgatio's various neighbours (i.e., Stratford, Koháry, Esterházy, Lascelles, Cholmondeley, Arenberg, and Boisschot) who were sponsoring them in an attempt to suppress the revolution in Purgatio and create internal troubles for the brand-new Revolutionary Consulate, all in the hopes of stifling the nascent regime's development in its infancy.

From 1825 onwards, the Revolutionary Consulate and the ALPP began the painful and difficult process of pushing into counter-revolutionary territory and reasserting the revolutionaries' control over the rural municipalities and the outlying pastoral agrarian districts of the country, one-by-one, a process which was only to be completed on 29 March 1835, when Bernard Auteuil and Gérard Marceau finally declared victory over the "remnant forces of royalist tyranny and despotism at long last". Throughout the civil war, the Revolutionary Consulate was not shy about the employment of political repression as a wartime measure to maintain its control over the urban city centres which it occupied at the close of the revolution, measures which it then implemented in the Purgation countryside as and when those areas fell under ALPP occupation. The Auteuil-Marceau administration erected 'special tribunals' or Les Tribunaux pour la Sauvegarde de la Révolution with sweeping powers to issue search warrants and arrest warrants and compel the attendance of persons suspected of 'anti-revolutionary subversion', in order to maintain control over ALPP-controlled areas of the country and stamp out counter-revolutionary sabotage and subterfuge.

As a result of a deliberate campaign to cultivate a political climate of la terreur révolutionnaire, segments of the populace linked to or associated with the old conservative order - especially Catholic clergymen and feudal aristocratic nobles - came under heavy suspicion and persecution for alleged collaboration with Purgatio's foreign enemies and internal reactionary militants, with many being detained indefinitely without trial, summarily executed, or subjected to extra-judicial harassment and killings by revolutionary mob violence. This period of la terreur révolutionnaire triggered a mass exodus of aristocrats and clergymen and their families who emigrated en masse into neighbouring countries for their own safety. By the close of the civil war in 1835, an estimated 760,000 to 990,000 persons had been killed, imprisoned, dispossessed, or forced into political exile as part of la terreur révolutionnaire.

Once the Revolutionary Consulate had prevailed in the civil war of 1824-1835, the Auteuil-Marceau administration then set up a Constitutional Committee (conseil constitutionnel) which went about drafting a written codified Constitution for the Republic of Purgatio. That constitution - which included codified rules and principles such as a limited franchise (to all adult male citizens meeting certain property qualifications), citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis), a democratically elected legislature and presidency, constitutionally limited government, separation of powers, civil liberties protections, and guaranteed political freedoms, including freedom of expression, association, and assembly, amongst others - was promulgated on 3 October 1835. The leaders of the Revolutionary Consulate and the ALPP set up a new political party - the Purgation Democratic Party (PDP) (or Le Parti Démocratique de la Purgatio (PDP)) - which promised only to defend the gains of the recent Purgation Revolution, which went on to secure more than 65% of the vote and sweep up 739 out of 860 seats in the new unicameral Purgation National Congress (PNC). Bernard Auteuil would become the first Prime Minister (PM) of Purgatio on 1 November 1835, while his deputy Gérard Marceau would become her first President on 28 November 1835 after triumphing in the first national presidential elections and winning over 69% of all the ballots cast that year.

Whether the PDP's thumping landslide victory in the polls of 1835 was attributable to its widespread popularity amongst the Purgation people in the wake of the successful toppling of the Valois monarchy in, and subsequent defence of, the Purgation Revolution, or was the result of the climate of fear cultivated by political repression and the suppression of anti-revolutionary dissent in la terreur révolutionnaire, has been the subject of much academic debate and historical controversy. Regardless of which of these views is correct, the PDP would continue to hold onto a monopoly on Purgation electoral politics for over half a century, until the formation of a new centre-left, social democratic party known as the Liberal Progressives of Purgatio (LPP) (or Les Libéraux Progressistes des Purgations (LPP)) on 13 February 1898. The LPP ran on a platform of promising to extend universal suffrage to all adult citizens irrespective of their sex, wealth, and property, to abolish child labour, introduce free universal public primary school education for all children irrespective of their household income or resources, introduce a minimum wage for workers, establish legal protections for organised labour and industrial action by the working-class, and implement land reforms by establishing a committee to acquire land from the landed gentry to be redistributed amongst segments of the landless rural peasantry. The LPP performed well in its first election on 28 October 1899, winning over 43% of all votes cast and 239 out of 860 seats in the PNC. At the very next election on 29 October 1905, however, the LPP would break the PDP's monopoly on political power, becoming the first ever democratically elected government of Purgatio that was not composed of PDP politicians, winning just over 52% of all votes cast and garnering a simple majority of the legislature with 434 out of 860 seats in the PNC.

The LPP's rise and success coincided with a so-called 'halcyon era' of Purgation history, known to many at the time as L'Époque Prospère et Belle - the Prosperous and Beautiful Era - lasting from around the 1880s to the 1920s. The historical legacy of that period is a mixed one. The celebratory descriptor of L'Époque Prospère et Belle ascribed to that roughly four-decade period by many journalists, politicians, and academics at the time was a reference to that period's rapid industrialisation, booming economic growth, the rise of new industries in the cities, a wave of skilled immigration attracted by the opportunities presented, and an estimated average real wage growth of over 85% from 1882 to 1919. The period is also often associated with the creation of beautiful new styles of art, music, fashion, literature, theatre, architecture, and opera, and is generally viewed by many as an age of great cultural innovation, aesthetic self-expression by the auteurs of the day, and widespread creative and artistic flourishing throughout the country.

However, that period also coincided with a huge increase in income and wealth inequality, powerful commercial monopolies dominating the political landscape, the widespread suppression of the labour movement (whether through hired mercenaries or aggressive lawsuits), dangerous and unsanitary working conditions in factories, poor-houses, and work-houses, overcrowded workers' dormitories in the cities, the rise of sprawling urban slums in the inner-cities in which homelessness and vagrancy flourished, and perhaps the most notable social issue of the time which became a cause célèbre amongst the political left - the increased exploitation of child labour.

The LPP made the abolition of child labour a centrepiece of its campaign and party platform, and tapped into a cultural and social anxiety over the growing socio-economic inequalities of the time, and won their first legislative electoral victory in 1905. In 1907, the LPP enacted the so-called 'Grand Reform Package' which included the enactment of universal suffrage, the abolition of child labour, and the implementation of universal mandatory primary education, thereby cementing its place within Purgation democratic politics from thenceforth. Consequently, the LPP broke the PDP's monopoly on Purgation electoral politics, which would instead be dominated by a PDP-LPP duopoly from thereon, with both political parties regularly trading and exchanging their grip on power in periodic election cycles. That PDP-LPP electoral duopoly would remain firmly in place for the next eight decades or so, until the legislative elections of 1987.

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 11:08 pm

Rise of Purgation Fascism (1934-1988)

The general optimism and enthusiasm of L'Époque Prospère et Belle was followed by a prolonged period of economic stagnation across the 1930s to 1950s, characterised by years of little to no annual growth in the Purgation economy, a general decline in real wages relative to inflation, high interest rates, increases in the rates of inflation and the general cost of living, and specific bouts of stagflation assailing the Purgation economy (e.g., in 1934-1936; 1948-1949; 1956-1959), periods in which unemployment rates rose even as inflation rates continued to increase. These negative economic conditions were attributable, in large part, to the general business cycle and, in particular, the bursting of the expanding financial and asset-price bubble from the boom years of L'Époque Prospère et Belle which culminated in the May 1934 stock market crash in Avidité and the beginning of the nation's first ever stagflation crisis in the national economy from 1934 to 1936. This roughly two-decade period of economic malaise contributed substantially to the growth in left-wing politics in Purgatio, and in particular, the increasing interest in communism and in Marxist-Leninist ideology amongst some students, intellectuals, journalists, and the more radicalised segments of the working-class from the 1950s and 1960s onwards. This growing left-wing 'counter-cultural' socialist movement, juxtaposed sharply against the continuing PDP-LPP duopoly over Purgation electoral politics, which remained dominated by the mainstream centre-right PDP and centre-left LPP, would have a direct impact in contributing to an overall decline in social and political stability. This problem was only exacerbated when, on 11 September 1965, the Kingdom of Stulitia fell to a Communist uprising of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, who established the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia, which then began providing financial, materiel, and logistical support to neighbouring Marxist guerrillas in the region, with an eye towards fostering a similar Communist revolt in her neighbours, Animiria and Purgatio both.

As a consequence, from the early-1960s to the late-1980s, the Republic of Purgatio came to be engulfed in a period of internal instability, ideological disunion, and an uptick in political violence and infighting commonly referred to by journalists and academics at the time as Les Années de Sang et de Plomb - the Years of Blood and Lead. The year 1956 saw the founding of the Communist Party of Purgatio (CPP) (or Le Parti Communiste des Purgations (PCP)), and only a few years after, the CPP founded an armed militant wing of the party - L'Épée du Peuple - on 19 August 1958. The CPP ran on a Marxist-Leninist ideological platform of instituting a socialist state with a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' with an eye towards achieving a classless communist society, and met with little electoral success at the ballot box (garnering less than 6% of the national vote in the 1960 legislative elections), but its armed militia L'Épée du Peuple was able to recruit an estimated 180,000 to 240,000 members by 1963, and with a fighting force that was disproportionately drawn from the young male working-class demographic of the country. With that sizeable force under its wing, L'Épée du Peuple was able to launch various terrorist attacks, armed uprisings, and insurgent campaigns in the decades following its founding. These included a failed assassination attempt upon the Prime Minister (PM) at a campaign rally in La Roche on 4 May 1969, the mortar bombing of the headquarters of Les Laboratoires de Corday in Savoy-Ducasse on 18 November 1972, the planting and igniting of a pipe bomb in the police divisional headquarters of Lyons on 6 July 1974 which resulted in 8 deaths and 37 casualties, and the attempted firebombing of the Avidité Stock Exchange on 22 February 1975 which led to a shutdown of all market trades from Avidité for more than 7 hours of that day.

Both the PDP and LPP political leaderships expressed their staunch opposition to both the ideology and tactics of the CPP and its armed wing, L'Épée du Peuple, but successive administrations experienced great difficulties in detecting and averting CPP attacks or arresting and prosecuting their perpetrators. L'Épée du Peuple operated as a loosely organised irregular band of 'lone-wolf' operatives, with little standing command structure, and given the 'hit-and-run' nature of its small-scale guerrilla attacks, their individual militants often faded and blended back into the civilian population after having successfully perpetrated a terrorist attack. Consequently, traditional or conventional methods of investigation and crime-prevention, including the obtaining of search warrants or wiretapping warrants based on individualised suspicion, the need for articulable reasonable suspicion for potential CPP operatives to be arrested or detained for investigations, or the building of cases against particular suspects to be prosecuted and proven beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law, proved to be ineffective in curtailing such CPP guerrilla attacks by L'Épée du Peuple militants.

With the traditional security apparatus overwhelmed and so ill-equipped to respond effectively to such attacks, this period of Purgation history coincided with a sharp rise in private vigilantism and street hooliganism, as growing segments of the civilian populace began to take up arms in individual neighbourhoods and communities for the expressed purpose of combatting the security threat posed by the CPP and L'Épée du Peuple. Regional communities witnessed the rise of provincial military volunteer units or paramilitary groups, often colloquially referred to as les volontaires auxiliaires by the public at large, which would operate within their own neighbourhoods and roam about and police their local communities in an attempt to root out all suspected CPP operatives and detect any perceived Communist subversive or insurgent activities.

These private paramilitary organisations operated outside of the law, acted with complete autonomy within their local communities, and often functioned on a day-to-day basis with little oversight or accountability. As a result, it was not uncommon for the volontaires auxiliaires to act based on suspicion alone, abducting or assaulting any persons within their neighbourhood whom they or members of their community believed to be a CPP operative or a L'Épée du Peuple fighter, often based on nothing more than their left-wing ideological sympathies, history of outspoken activism or civil disobedience, or even demographic factors such as their sex, age, race, and class. It was also not uncommon for the volontaires auxiliaires to use extreme force and brutality to torture their victims, intimidate their opponents, extract confessions from their targets, terrify and deter potential communists through the infliction of graphic and vivid extrajudicial punishments, and maintain general order within their local communities. The conventional police forces often did little to intervene to curtail the activities of the volontaires auxiliaires, thereby granting them a free hand to operate with broad and general impunity.

As a result, the historical period of Les Années de Sang et de Plomb was characterised by ubiquitous political violence, including street fights and regular public brawls breaking out between volontaires auxiliaires paramilitary soldiers and L'Épée du Peuple militants. On several prominent occasions, such bouts of political violence went beyond mere affrays and public fighting alone. On 14-16 January 1978, CPP and L'Épée du Peuple fighters and militants took over the provincial capital city of Provence and temporarily declared the existence of La République Populaire de Montoire. It took approximately one month for the Purgation regular military to mobilise and invade the Montoire province and re-establish control of the area by 19 February 1978. In that interim one-month period, the Montoire province and the city of Provence in particular were engulfed in street warfare and shoot-outs between the CPP forces attempting to assert control over the area and their local volontaires auxiliaires attempting to put down the uprising by force. These public shoot-outs and gunfights effectively shutdown the city for a month and was estimated to have claimed over 112 lives with over 1,200 seriously wounded. The violent disorder and chaos, which had engulfed the country's second most-populous city no less, shocked the nation and left an indelible mark and scar upon the public's psyche and their general perception of the country's state of affairs, and the so-called 'Montoire Incident' of January-February 1978 was termed Le Carnage à Provence by the Purgation press in the months thereafter.

More incidents of political violence would come to follow in the subsequent months and years. On 9 October 1978, an assembled crowd of supporters of a far-right, white supremacist organisation, the Purgation Defence Union (PDU) (or L'Union pour la Défense de la Purgatio (UDP)), held a rally in the small Montfauçon city of Barres to protest Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigration into Purgatio following a spate of prominent high-profile scandals involving 'Asian grooming gangs'. The impassioned crowd of PDU supporters began marching on the capital city of Ravaliér before attempting to storm the PNC building, in an apparent attempt to seize control of the country's governance by force, before the crowd was forcefully dispersed by law enforcement and Congressional security troopers, resulting in an estimated 13 deaths and 101 injured, in another violent incident which became known as Le Bain de Sang au Congrès National to the political right and Le Coup d'État d'Octobre to the political left.

On 27 March 1979, the CPP organised a general strike of workers in the provincial capital city of La Roche, which turned into a violent uprising as striking workers clashed in the streets against strikebreakers and plant supervisors and factory floor taskmasters. These clashes soon escalated into a wider, more ambitious attempt to seize control of all the heavily industrialised areas of the larger province of Lusignan. Left-wing militants in L'Épée du Peuple seized control of the state parliament building on 4 April 1979 and held the legislators hostage as supporters staged revolts and uprisings in surrounding cities such as Provençal, kidnapping and abducting various prominent aristocrats and industrialists to hold them to ransom in La Révolte Rouge en Lusignan. The conventional police forces, with the assistance and support of the brutal tactics of the local volunteer fighters in the provincial volontaires auxiliaires - most of whom were themselves military veterans or former police officers - put down the uprising by 9 April 1979. Over 35 lives were claimed in the incident and in the weeks to follow, the provincial government of Lusignan perpetrated massive round-ups of communists, labour activists, and trade unionists which saw over 5,000 persons arrested and prosecuted for terrorism, sedition, and/or subversion, and with more than 700 others who were suspected of involvement in the general strike and/or the subsequent uprising being extra-judicially executed by members of their local volontaires auxiliaires.

And on 19 June 1980, the provincial volontaires auxiliaires of the province of Le Tellier, led by their commander Nicolas Charlet, launched Le Putsch Pétrussien de Charlet in an attempt to overthrow the provincial government of Le Tellier and establish a far-right military dictatorship under the charge of himself and his volunteer paramilitary forces. The catalyst for that coup d'état had been the events which followed an earlier Islamist terrorist attack involving a mass shooting in a crowded supermarket in the provincial capital city of Pétrus by a fighter in the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organisation known as The Brigade of Deir Yassin which had earlier claimed the lives of 21 innocents. The shooting ended in a suicide by the gunman and, in the following years, the provincial authorities of Le Tellier attempted to investigate the organisation and prosecute all operatives of The Brigade of Deir Yassin who had been involved in planning and organising the mass shooting in Pétrus. Eventually, on 4 August 1978, nineteen members of The Brigade of Deir Yassin of Arab-Muslim descent were charged with a whole slew of terrorism-related offences, and stood accused of aiding and abetting the Pétrus shooting by having planned the attack. The trial of the so-called Les Dix-Neuf du Marché Génois (named after the location of the Pétrus attack in the Genovese Market area) began in earnest on 16 October 1979, and only ended on 3 March 1980. The fourteen-member jury returned from deliberations to the Pétrus courthouse on 19 June 1980 to deliver their verdict. When the jury decided to acquit the nineteen accused, the volontaires auxiliaires who were amongst the protestors and demonstrators assembled outside the court building, awaiting the verdict, were ordered by Nicolas Charlet to storm the building and occupy the courthouse. When the building was under their control, the volontaires auxiliaires immediately began seizing and rounding up all attendees and judicial officers inside as hostages, following which they tortured and then summarily executed the nineteen defendants and did the same to the fourteen jurors who had acquitted them. The paramilitary fighters then hung the thirty-three graphically mutilated bodies on nooses outside the courthouse with signs reading "Les Traîtres aux Purgations - Ne vous ai-nous pas avertis?" (or "Traitors to the Purgation People - Didn't We Warn You?"), scrawled in the scarlet-red blood of the victims. Nicolas Charlet then declared himself the new dictateur of Pétrus and the entire province of Le Tellier, and sent an official demand to the provincial government in Pétrus to step down and recognise his authority, accusing them of "spineless fecklessness, cowardice, and weakness that has utterly failed the people of this country, time and time again". The failed putsch attempt ended in a bloodied struggle between Nicolas Charlet's volontaires auxiliaires and the provincial police forces which stormed the courthouse to regain control and forcefully put down Charlet's coup, which ended in a government victory and the arrest of Nicolas Charlet and his forces on 25 June 1980, but with an estimated 18 civilians who were trapped in the Pétrus courthouse being killed in the ensuing battle, having been caught in the middle of the resulting cross-fire as unfortunate collateral damage.

It was in the midst of this violent and chaotic political climate that the Purgation National League (PNL) (or La Ligue Nationale de la Purgatio (LNP)) came to be founded by Charlon-Arlay and Geneviève de la Fayette on 29 April 1981. At the time of the PNL's founding, the party had fewer than 50 registered members, most of whom were relatively young (in their twenties or early-to-mid thirties) and disproportionately belonged to former households of Purgatio's prior historical ennobled aristocracy. Founding members of the PNL included, in addition to the De La Fayette husband and wife founding duo, Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette (younger sister of Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette), Joslyn de Lussan, Alain de Corday, Charlotte de Laval, Juste-Charles de Givenchy, and Marin de la Trémouille. The party's leadership was drawn largely from the aristocratic, bourgeois, and petit bourgeois socio-economic classes, consisting of a combination of prominent businesspersons (Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette, Charlotte de Laval, and Alain de Corday), government lawyers (Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette and Joslyn de Lussan), top geneticists and scientific researchers (Marin de la Trémouille and Geneviève de la Fayette), and military officers (Juste-Charles de Givenchy). There were, however, exceptions to this general trend, and two notable deviations amongst the PNL's founding members included Delrico Charlet and Devona Moreau, a former soldier and former police constable respectively, both of whom hailed from working-class families and a more lower-middle-income socio-economic background, and both of whom were also volunteer paramilitary soldiers in their local volontaires auxiliaires at the time of the PNL's founding (with Delrico Charlet also being the nephew of Nicolas Charlet, who had launched the failed Putsch Pétrussien back in 1980).

The PNL's 1981 Party Platform consisted of just three main pillars or 'planks' - first, the restoration of "Law and Order" throughout the country; second, economic revitalisation through increased spending on the military and law enforcement to be paid for through a package of 'labour liberalisation' reforms, privatisation, and cuts to welfare and job-seeker assistance and other such social programmes; and third, what the party termed a "guarantee of freedom of genetic information", which it described as a promise to 'invest in genetic research to identify causes of antisocial and parasitical behaviours' and to make all results of such research 'available for public consumption' for the sake of the 'social betterment of our nation and people'. The PNL also framed itself in its 1981 platform as an 'apolitical, non-ideological party dedicated only to pursuing common-sensical, across-the-board solutions to the nation's many social problems', which was 'not wedded slavishly to the blinkered partisan agenda of any one fringe or extremist political faction', but sought only 'national unity, solidarity, the restoration of social harmony, and a definitive end to the embittered chaotic infighting and endless political violence that has torn this nation apart and asunder for decades'. In other words, the PNL wished to present itself as a neutral, non-aligned, apolitical force that wanted only to unify the nation, bring the country together, and end the political violence and civil strife of Les Années de Sang et de Plomb. Nevertheless, in truth, the PNL's 1981 Party Platform demonstrated clearly that the PNL was indeed a far-right party with an extremist ideological platform which fell strongly and squarely on the fringes and to the right of Purgation politics at that time. That much was clear not only from the strong ties and connections between the PNL and the far-right volontaires auxiliaires across the country, the staunchly demonising anti-communist rhetoric from PNL politicians who often attacked socialists and communists as a force of 'lawlessness', 'anarchy', 'disorder', 'chaotic infighting', 'terrorism', and 'factionalist partisan disaster for this nation', in numerous charged campaign speeches and public statements, but most of all, it was evident from the contents of a political treatise authored by Geneviève de la Fayette (as Geneviève Aumont) back in 1976 which was subsequently re-published as an annex to the PNL's 1981 Party Platform, entitled La Solution Finale, which was a shortened and abbreviated form of its full title - La Solution Finale au Problème de la Classe Génétiquement Dysfonctionnelle et de la Détérioration de l'Organisme National (or The Final Solution to the Problem of the Genetically Disordered Strain and the Degeneration of the Body National).

La Solution Finale was not the official Party Platform of the PNL, but it was authored by one of its founding members, annexed to its platform, and frequently discussed in favourable terms on the campaign trail. While the treatise never outrightly called for genocide of any kind, it spoke in urgent and apocalyptic terms about the dangers of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel or genetically disordered Purgations and how they would soon bring the country to a state of catastrophic desecration and ruination. The treatise characterised the nation's many social and economic problems as a product of "decades upon decades of unchecked dysgenics", the absence (and active artificial curtailment through social policy) of critical forces and pressures of natural selection - which it described as Le Mandat de la Nature or a 'Mandate of Nature' - to discourage the "over-fertility of antisocial, deviant, and parasitical segments of the society - criminals, terrorists, predators, the crippled, the retarded, the disordered and feeble-minded, the work-shy, the vagrant, the addict, the indolent, the moochers and hangers-on, the over-reliants and chronically dependents incapable of self-sufficiency, and all other such manner of persons altogether unfit for integration into a healthy, productive society, whose self-perpetuation of their own kind has collectively contributed to a deleterious and calamitous degradation in the eusocial quality of our 'body national' and our 'national organism' - that is, of our national people's community". It was conspicuously silent, however, on any specific solutions proposed to redress the problem of a perceived decline in the quality of the nation's gene-pool through decades of 'dysgenic procreation and perpetuation', but attributed all of the nation's problems, including violent criminality and economic decline, to the problem of 'dysgenics' and the growing numbers of the 'genetically disordered' in the Purgation populace.

The PNL performed poorly in its first national elections on 4 November 1981. The party garnered only 33 out of 860 seats in the PNC, less than the PDP (379), the LPP (371), the Purgation Libertarians (PL) (46), and beating only the CPP (24) and the Patriotic Front of Purgatio (PFP) (7). This was due in no small part to the PNC's First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting system, which amplified the electoral success of political parties with either a higher quantity of broad mainstream support (like the PDP and LPP) or highly concentrated regional support in particularised constituencies (like the PL which had low overall support but highly concentrated support in constituencies situated in the highly commercialised areas of Avidité and Poisson) whilst penalising and under-representing political parties with less electoral success.

However, even in terms of the percentage of votes won, the PNL's 14.3% share of the national vote in 1981 still lagged significantly behind the PDP (35.8%) and LPP (32.1%) whilst beating only the CPP (9.5%), PFP (5.1%), and PL (3.2%). The PNL's presidential candidate (Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette) would go on to attain a similar result in the presidential elections on 25 November 1981, garnering only 13.8% of all ballots cast, far behind that of the PDP candidate (40.8%), Pierre de Craon, who went on to become the President of Purgatio on 1 December 1981.

The PNL's political fortunes would, however, change very drastically only six years later in the 6 November 1987 elections, in no small part due to the 1986 financial crisis, in which a collapse of asset values due to the sudden burst of a financial bubble from speculative trades and inflows of 'hot money' led to an abrupt stock market crash on the Avidité Stock Exchange on 18 March 1986. That financial crash had calamitous and potent 'ripple-effects' on the rest of the Purgation economy, as lending rates fell in the midst of a credit crunch and a paralysed financial market and the wider economy was thrown into a deflationary spiral, with major financial institutions sent into a parlous financial state of near-bankruptcy from a combination of anaemic balance sheets due to failed investments and resultant panicked bank-runs from consumers. Small businesses closed down due to the unavailability of cheap credit, unemployment increased, and overall aggregate demand and economic production fell drastically, resulting in the Great Recession of 1986. It has been estimated that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Purgatio contracted by over 32% from 1986 to 1987, with the unemployment rate shooting up from 8.2% in 1986 to 21.8% in 1987, and with youth unemployment in particular even exceeding 40% by 1987.

Moreover, going into the Great Recession, the government had been running an annual budget deficit of 9.7% (as a percentage of GDP), which rose to over 15% after the country's economy contracted. That, coupled with the country's already high sovereign debt-to-GDP ratio of over 190%, saw the country's credit rating of government bonds fall from AA+ to AA, which triggered a loss of investor confidence in the economy, capital flight, a further fall in lending and investment, increased interest rates that further contributed to the closure of small-to-medium businesses, and a 'crowding-out effect' as the Purgation government continued to borrow more money at ever-higher rates to finance its continuing deficit. Increased lending and borrowing costs contributed to an inflationary crisis as costs for businesses and consumers rose across the nation, and so an already-disastrous deflationary crisis in 1986 was transformed into an even more severe stagflationary crisis in 1987, with inflation contributing to a 'wage-cost spiral' effect which further damaged the already-battered Purgation economy.

Additionally, crime rates rose precipitously during the Great Recession, in large part due to the sudden increase in unemployment, especially youth unemployment, coupled with a sharp increase in the percentage of households living under the national poverty line which spiked from 11.6% in 1986 to 25.5% in 1987. The inner cities of Ravaliér, Provence, Poisson, Pétrus, Savoy-Ducasse, Limogens, and many others, became engulfed in thefts, robberies, burglaries, knife crime, beatings, homicides, sexual assaults, and other acts of hooliganism, street violence, gang wars, and juvenile delinquency. Organised criminal syndicates like Les Frérots formed to establish control of the urban trade in drug trafficking and human trafficking and establish 'protection rackets' fuelled by a combination of kidnappings, armed burglaries, 'people smuggling', and all manners of blackmail and extortion, within the urban city-centres under their influence and de facto control. It was estimated that the rate of violent and sexual offences in Ravaliér more than quadrupled from 26 per 1,000 residents in 1986 to 119 per 1,000 residents in 1987.

And to top it all off, like the proverbial icing on the cake, two young militant fighters in The Brigade of Deir Yassin committed a brutal terrorist attack by committing a suicide-bombing attack in a crowded metropolitan railway station in Provençal on 16 October 1987, claiming the lives of 17 people and critically injuring over 150 others, right in the middle of the election campaigning season and shortly before the election of 6 November 1987 was due to take place.

Given the confluence of events leading up to the 1987 election, it is unsurprising that the PNL politicians made their promise to restore "Law and Order" the core centrepiece of their campaign, promising to institute a slew of 'emergency security measures' to stomp out violent crime, drug crime, organised crime, and terrorism, by whatever means necessary - including the granting of expanded powers of surveillance to national security agencies and law enforcement bodies, allowing for preventative detention without trial, permitting security agencies to perform extra-judicial targeted assassinations of suspected leaders of terrorist organisations and criminal syndicates, allowing for warrantless searches and seizures, the imposition of curfews coupled with round-the-clock police patrols, liberalising the police's 'use of force' standards to lower the threshold for the use of violent and even lethal force to prevent crime, expanding qualified immunity for police officers and security agents, erecting a national DNA database, rolling out national ID cards, employing tortuous and abusive methods of 'enhanced interrogations' upon terrorist suspects and members of dangerous syndicates, the deportation of gang members and other foreign criminals, the closing of the country's borders to all low-skilled immigrants from 'high-risk countries' whose nationals were overrepresented in crime statistics, the expanded use of military and security tribunals with lowered evidential thresholds and 'closed door' proceedings, the increased use of 'stop and search' tactics and 'broken window' policing, the reintroduction of capital punishment and judicial flogging, the imposition of mandatory minimum sentencing and 'three-strikes' laws, increasing the list of 'non-bailable offences' and expanding the use of 'remand prisons' before trials, suspending habeas corpus protections, eliminating parole for all violent and gang-related offences, eliminating the 'right to silence' and 'right to counsel' for criminal suspects and all 'speedy trial' requirements, expanding pre-trial detentions and eliminating the requirement of post-arrest arraignment hearings for suspects, ending the juvenile justice system and prosecuting juvenile offenders as adults, permitting security agencies and law enforcement to employ more robust and fine-tuned criminal profiling and 'crime-mapping' techniques, militarising the police force, even making promises to place high-crime areas of the country under a complete military occupation and police lockdown.

These populist promises of "Law and Order at any cost whatsoever" proved highly effective in the 1987 campaign. The economic collapse of the Great Recession resulted in a marked and precipitous decline in support for the mainstream political parties, with the electorate gravitating to anti-establishment parties which had previously been on the far fringes of mainstream electoral politics. Consequently, the PNL share of the vote rose sharply from 14.3% in 1981 to 32.1% in 1987, narrowly beating out the CPP which garnered 28.8% of the vote in 1987, up from 9.5% in 1981. Due to the PNC's FPTP voting system, the PNL became the largest party in the PNC with 378 out of 860 seats (close to the 431 seats needed for an outright legislative majority), followed closely by the CPP's 303 out of 860 seats.

Meanwhile, the two mainstream parties now lagged behind the PNL and CPP in democratic politics, with the PDP garnering only 17.4% of the vote (down from 35.8% in 1981) and the LPP garnering only 16.5% (down from 32.1% in 1981). Additionally, as the FPTP voting system inflated and amplified the effects of electoral gains and losses alike, this decline had a disproportionate effect on the extent of the two parties' loss of representation in the PNC. Now, the PDP would hold onto only 90 seats and the LPP would have only 89 seats left. Both the Purgation Libertarians (PL) (or Les Libertaires Purgatiens (LP)) and the far-right, white-supremacist Patriotic Front of Purgatio (PFP) (or Le Front Patriotique de la Purgatio (FPP)) would take no seats at all after seeing their respective shares of the national vote decline very slightly by just a few percentage points from before. Hence, by 1987, the traditional PDP-LPP duopoly on electoral politics had been well and truly broken.

No less dramatic, however, were the results of the subsequent presidential election on 28 November 1987. Given the high vote shares for the PNL (32.1%) and CPP (28.8%), it was widely expected that the winner of the presidency would come from either of those two extremist parties. This was not to be the case. The leader of the PNL, Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette, would mysteriously and unexpectedly announce on 9 November 1987 - just three days after the results of the 6 November 1987 legislative elections were released - that he was "humbled" by the recent "stunning show of support" shown by the Purgation public for his party, the PNL, but that he would be withdrawing his candidacy for the presidential election and endorsing the incumbent President Pierre de Craon, for the "sake of national unity and my patriotic duty to place my country before my party". The very same day, President Pierre de Craon would give a speech thanking the PNL party leader for his endorsement, promising to "honour the will of the Purgation people", in reference to the recent election results, and swearing that if elected he would appoint Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette as the Prime Minister, with the confidence of the PNC, and appoint a Cabinet consisting of PNL and PDP politicians, to "faithfully and loyally implement the democratically endorsed promise of the PNL party to restore Law and Order to this country and rescue this nation from the scourge of domestic violence and civil strife" - including by invoking the constitutional emergency powers of the presidential office, if need be.

There has been much speculation about the circumstances which led up to these twin surprise announcements of Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette and Pierre de Craon on 9 November 1987. It has been widely suggested, for instance, that shortly after the 1987 general election results were announced, the party leaderships of the PNL and PDP may have negotiated a backroom deal for the PNL to throw its full weight and support behind the incumbent President in exchange for his providing them with a Cabinet dominated by PNL politicians and his use of the presidential powers under the prevailing constitution to empower the PNL to implement the sweeping security and anti-crime measures which it had promised the electorate during its 1987 campaign. The motivation for such a deal being brokered may, perhaps, have been a mutual fear of communism and a shared anxiety that, given the closeness of the voting shares of the PNL and CPP in the 1987 legislative elections, the prospect of a Communist victory in the presidential elections could not safely be ruled out altogether.

With that endorsement and alliance secured, President Pierre de Craon would sail to a very comfortable victory in the 1987 presidential elections, garnering a 44.9% share of all votes cast, far ahead of the CPP candidate, Edgar Bonheur, and his 32.6% share of the national votes, retaining the Purgation presidency in the process. Shortly after his inauguration on 1 December 1987, he would fulfil his campaign promise to the PNL's voters by appointing Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette as the Prime Minister (PM) of Purgatio on 9 December 1987. On 10 December 1987, he would announce the members of his Cabinet administration, which was overwhelmingly dominated by the PNL's leadership, with Alain de Corday as Foreign Secretary, Joslyn de Lussan as Home Secretary, Charlotte de Laval as Treasury Secretary, Juste-Charles de Givenchy as Defence Secretary, and Geneviève de la Fayette as Justice Secretary. That PNL-PDP Coalition Cabinet would be comfortably ratified by the PNC by a clear vote margin of 454-401 on 12 December 1987.

However, the more significant act of President Pierre de Craon was to exercise his emergency powers under Article 27 of the Constitution of the Republic of Purgatio, which granted the President the power to recognise the existence of a "public emergency of exceptional crisis and urgency threatening the life of the nation" and implement emergency measures "in a limited derogation from" the other constitutional provisions - including the clauses establishing legal protections for human rights and civil liberties - "to the necessary extent". He would issue an 'Article 27 presidential order' on 13 December 1987, which formally recognised the recent spate of violent crime, organised crime, and terrorist attacks as such a "public emergency" and enacted a broadly worded decree authorising his Prime Minister to undertake "all measures necessary and beneficial for the redress of that public emergency, until such time as the Presidential office may otherwise come to determine that that emergency has abated".

Prime Minister (PM) Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would, along with his Justice Secretary Geneviève de la Fayette and his Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, place a wide interpretation on the President's 'Article 27 order' and make very generous use of its delegation of emergency powers, promulgating more than 1,700 'executive orders' between the three of them throughout December 1987 and January 1988, thereby implementing into law the various national and internal security measures which the PNL had promised voters in the 1987 election to swiftly restore "Law and Order" and stamp out all crime across the streets of Purgatio. With these expanded powers of investigation and arrest, national security agencies and law enforcement bodies instituted a harsh and brutal nationwide crackdown on organised crime, criminal gangs, terrorism, and violent and drug-related criminality more generally, with an estimated 6-7 million persons having been arrested or detained without trial or charge and an additional 210,000 persons subjected to extra-judicial killings for their suspected involvement in criminal activity in 1988, and with more than 1.9 million foreign nationals estimated to have been summarily deported back to their countries of origin without due process or any trial or hearing for suspected criminal activities in that same period. Curfews were instituted in practically all majorly populated cities in the country, with the densely populated inner-city areas of particularly 'high-crime' municipalities like Ravaliér and Provence being placed under a total police lockdown and tight military occupation. In addition, the government continued to encourage the frontier vigilante policing of groups like the provincial volontaires auxiliaires, many of which had been slowly recruited, incorporated, and then assimilated into the PNL's very own party paramilitary organisation, the Purification Order (or L'Ordre pour la Purification de la Purgatio), which was granted a free hand by the administration to aid and assist the Purgation conventional police's round-ups of suspected gangsters and criminals and extra-judicial seizures and killings of suspected terrorists and syndicate leaders. This entire process was referred to by the government at the time as La Grande Épuration de la Nation.

Amongst these many 'executive orders' included an executive order on 14 December 1987 which established L'Institut Hygiène Génétique de la Purgatio (IHGP) or the Purgation Institute of Genetic Cleanliness (PIGC). Marin de la Trémouille was appointed as the PIGC's first ever Director, and given a broad mandate to establish a national DNA database, with all residents required by law to submit their DNA and genetic material in a nationwide census and with their genetic identity authenticated by national ID cards to be issued by the PIGC once it had compiled and analysed the genetic material in that database. In addition, the PIGC was tasked with conducting research into the "biological and genetic causes of any antisocial, deviant, and/or parasitical traits or behaviours with the tendency to undermine social harmony, productivity, vitality, and/or general welfare and well-being". That national DNA database was intended to aid and assist in the investigation of crimes through genetic profiling of crime scene biological materials and by tracking the movements and whereabouts of criminal suspects through the use of national ID cards for banking, transport, commerce, and all governmental administrative transactions (e.g., in schools or in hospitals) as a convenient means of identity verification.

This crackdown would escalate further still in intensity when, on 8 June 1988, a militant in the CPP's armed wing, L'Épée du Peuple, Jean-Henri Pelletier, was caught red-handed by the Purgation police in Ravaliér attempting to install an improvised explosive device (IED) in the interior of the Purgation National Congress (PNC) building. The '1988 Pelletier bomb plot' was a major political scandal at the time, with prominent PNL leaders including the Prime Minister (PM) Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette openly accusing the CPP leadership of having authorised the plot to kill off the PNL-PDP coalition government in Ravaliér and disrupt their ongoing nationwide crackdown on violent and gang-related crime across the nation. On the urging of the PM, President Pierre de Craon would again exercise his powers under Article 27 of the Constitution to issue another presidential decree on 17 June 1988, recognising "Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist, and other such socialistic terrorism and insurgency" as a "public emergency of exceptional crisis and urgency threatening the life of the nation", and delegating even more emergency powers to the PM to enact security measures and take such action "as may be necessary for, or beneficial towards, redressing the problem of CPP terrorism and averting future such terrorist attacks, or attempts therefor, as that perpetrated on the 8th day of June, 1988".

On 21 June 1988, Prime Minister (PM) Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette immediately made use of that presidential decree to issue Executive Order (EO) No. 2911 of 1988, which suspended the application of all civil liberties, human rights, and due process provisions in the Constitution, and empowered the Purgation Police Force (PPF) to perform "any and all acts deemed necessary to detect and detain any persons reasonably suspected of involvement in the attempted seditious attack of the 8th day of June, 1988, in derogation from, and taking precedence over, any written or non-written rule of law preceding or succeeding the entry into force of the present Order". The next day, on 22 June 1988, the Purgation National Congress (PNC) enacted Le Loi sur la Protection de la République et l'Adoption de Mesures d'Urgence contre les Agressions Séditieuses contre son Peuple or the "Law for the Protection of the Republic and the Adoption of Emergency Measures Against Seditious Assaults on her People", which ratified the contents of EO 2911/1988 by a vote of 449-388 and thereby cemented its empowering provisions into statutory law; hence, it is often referred to by historians and academics as the "Emergency Empowering Act" for short.

From June to July of 1988, the PPF and the Home Office immediately began shutting down all left-wing and communist organisations, associations, affiliated unions, socialist-leaning media outlets, university student-led socialist organisations, and other communist or left-wing societies and activist groups, compiling and placing all such bodies on a published list of 'criminal organisations' (with membership thereof to be classified as an offence), arresting their leaders for interrogation, and forcefully shutting down communist meetings and rallies and violently dispersing left-wing protests and demonstrations, with the assistance of the regular armed forces and the PNL-affiliated Purification Order, which had become the de facto unified command structure organising all of the various provincial volontaires auxiliaires scattered across the nation. Activists, organisers, and union leaders were detained without trial for further investigations or charged and convicted before closed-door 'security tribunals' with evidences that were undisclosed for 'reasons of national security'.

Eventually, on 27 July 1988, Prime Minister (PM) Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette gave his formal authorisation for the PPF to arrest all persons named on a list of "Perpetrators of, and Accessories in, the PNC Pelletier Bomb Plot of 8 June 1988", said to have been derived from the "totality of the investigations" conducted by the Police since the arrest of Jean-Henri Pelletier on 8 June 1988, who had been subjected to a marathon round of tortuous 'enhanced interrogations' by PPF officers and Purgation security forces before being summarily executed without a trial on 30 June 1988. The list of persons to be arrested consisted of 4,768 names in total, inclusive of many prominent members within the party leaderships of the PDP, LPP, and CPP.

Although PM Chalon-Arlay took pains to stress in his public statement that he was only "acceding to the request of the Police investigators for a formal warrant of the Prime Minister's Office sanctioning them to proceed with their desired apprehensions", suggesting or implying that his Cabinet had no involvement in the contents of the list of suspects to be arrested or any of the names thereon, there was nevertheless much speculation to the effect that the determination of the list's contents had been politically motivated. Not only did it include numerous sitting Members of Congress elected to other parties within the legislature besides the reigning PNL, the specific elected legislators who were placed on the list seemed to conveniently correlate with their opposition to the recent measures of the PNL government. All of the highest-ranking CPP members elected to the PNC were on that list, as well as elected legislators from the PDP who had been the most vocally critical of President Pierre de Craon's recent alliance with the PNL, backbenchers like Matthias Lequeu and Lucien André and former Prime Minister (PM) Émile-Auguste Mousnier. As for the LPP, all of its senior leadership in the PNC who had been the most vocally critical of the PNL government and its recent emergency security measures and anti-crime crackdown - including by speaking out and voting against the recent Emergency Empowering Act - were also on the list of persons to be arrested, such as the Party Leader Florence Ghesquière, the Deputy Party Leader Christophe Gérard Favier, and the Party Whip Louise Dissard. In contrast, PDP politicians who were supportive of President Pierre de Craon's recent alliance with the PNL, including all of the PDP members of the PNL-PDP Coalition Cabinet, and the Party Leader Jules Philibert du Cerceau, were not on the list, and similarly, none of the LPP backbenchers who had been critical of their party leadership's recent opposition to the emergency security measures, many of whom had even spoken out in favour of the PNL's recent crackdown on violent and organised crime, were on the list either, including more centrist or centre-right LPP legislators like Claude Nicolas Baltard and Sébastien de Chomón.

Whatever the motivations behind the contents of the 'list of named perpetrators and accessories', the PM's authorisation was duly granted and from 27-31 July 1988, the PPF rounded up and apprehended 18 sitting legislators from the PDP, 37 elected lawmakers from the LPP, and 149 Members of Congress from the CPP. All in all, 204 out of 860 elected Members of Congress in the PNC were arrested by the Police for alleged involvement in the '1988 Pelletier bomb plot'. Many more PDP, LPP, and CPP politicians were arrested who were sitting members of provincial legislatures, councillors in local governments, former lawmakers or ministers, or ordinary party activists and rank-and-file grassroots campaigners. And of the 4,768 persons in total on that 'list' who were detained by the police, 891 were summarily executed for terrorism, treason, espionage, sedition, and attempted murder, and the remaining 3,877 persons were detained without trial or charge or any specified end-date for their detention.

Shortly after the apprehensions were completed, on 1 August 1988, the Prime Minister (PM) Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette issued a formal request to the office of President Pierre de Craon to call for a snap general election, with the given justification that the recent arrests had "so badly depleted the legislature of its rank and numbers to such an extent that the government of the day has thereby been deprived of the benefit of the collective wisdom and experience of an elected law-making body operating at its fullest and greatest capacity". He also requested that the election be set on a date "as soon as possible" to prevent "further delays and disruptions to the urgent business of government". The President agreed and set an "urgent election date" on 13 August 1988, thus providing for fewer than two weeks for parties to prepare and to campaign.

The 13 August 1988 election results would be a landslide victory for the PNL. The PNL's national share of the vote rose sharply from 32.1% in 1987 to 43.4% in 1988. The voting shares for the two mainstream parties remained relatively stable, with the PDP enjoying a slight increase from 17.4% in 1987 to 20.6% in 1988, and the LPP seeing a minor decrease in its vote share from 16.5% in 1987 to 15.3% in 1988. In contrast, the CPP national share of the vote experienced a steep decline from 28.8% in 1987 to just 15.4% in 1988.

Consequently, the PNL's representation grew to a massive 522 out of 860 seats (slightly short of the 574 seats needed for an outright two-thirds legislative majority to make constitutional amendments), while the PDP's representation grew slightly to win 101 seats, the LPP's share increased modestly to win 95 seats, whereas the CPP suffered a sharp decrease to just 137 seats in the PNC, down from 303 seats in the 1987 elections (the Purgation Libertarians won 3 seats with 3.1% of the vote and the Patriotic Front of Purgatio won 2 seats with 2.2% of the vote).

The precise causes of the PNL's landslide victory and successful electoral wipe-out and the corresponding heavy losses sustained by the CPP in the August 1988 legislative elections have been the subject of immense historical debate and academic speculation. Whether the election results may be said to have been attributable to the PNL's sweeping arrests of the senior leadership of its political opponents in such close proximity to the snap general election date, coupled with the systematic harassment of the opposition and its use of emergency security powers to repress political dissent - particularly in its widespread suppression of the political activities, associations, and campaign events of the CPP - or, to the contrary, was otherwise due to the Purgation public's genuine support for what they may have perceived as the PNL's tough and decisive crackdown on violent crime, organised criminal syndicates, and political terrorist activities, has been a deeply controversial and divisive question. Unsurprisingly, however, PNL party leaders at the time framed the result as a decisive and ringing endorsement of PNL policies by the Purgation electorate, with the Prime Minister (PM) Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette issuing a statement on 13 August 1988 that he was "deeply heartened and moved to witness the unity and solidarity of the Purgation people and the groundswell of support for our impassioned project to see to the restoration of law and order and a return to a state of peace, calm, tranquillity, and harmony in this great and beautiful nation, as we once enjoyed and may well come to enjoy once again".

Shortly after the PNL's landslide electoral victory, President Pierre de Craon announced his resignation from politics on 18 August 1988, following which the PNL-dominated PNC voted in favour of a resolution to merge the offices of head of state (President) and head of government (Prime Minister) into one single office - the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus - in the "interest of cementing and preserving the unity, harmony, and integrity of the sovereign Purgation realm and nation under the stalwart leadership and unyielding direction of her unified, undivided Sovereign". On 19 August 1988, the Prime Minister (PM) Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette issued a public statement that he was "grateful for and humbled by the National Congress's resolution, and honoured to accept", becoming the very first Magnificus Dominus of Purgatio. That same day, the Magnificus Dominus would issue an Executive Order (EO) renaming the nation to Le Royaume du Nettoyage de la Purgatio, promising that the PNL Government would continue its brutal and unwavering crackdown on organised crime, gang and drug-related violence, and political terrorism and insurgency, a project which he described in his EO as "La Grande Épuration de la Nation et le Bon Nettoyage du Corps National pour la Paix et la Glorie du Royaume", hence the proposed change in the nation's formal name.

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 11:26 pm

Consolidation of Power of PNL Purgatio (1988)

Following the merger of the offices of head of state and head of government into the Magnificus Dominus, the Premier of the Purgation National Congress, and the Party Leader of the largest political party in the PNC (viz., the PNL), Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette, proposed Le Loi sur le Rétablissement de l'Unité Nationale et l'Intégrité Politique du Royaume or the "Law for the Restoration of National Unity and Political Integrity of the Royaume" on 22 August 1988, which proposed to repeal the entirety of the Constitution of the Republic of Purgatio, without any textual replacement; hence, the Law's short title which was termed the "Constitution Repeal Act". In her Second Reading speech moving that Bill, in her capacity as La Première Législatrice du Congrès National, Jeanne-Emanuelle explained that the intent behind the proposed law was to "put a definitive end to the divisive, fractious, chaotic model of factional partisan politics which has engulfed this nation, held her people back, and arrested her development in a permanent state of political paralysis, all in the name of servicing the ideological agenda of upholding a so-called 'constitutional style of government'", adding that "the actions of this government just this year, in tackling criminality, organised syndicates, gangsterism, hooliganism, restoring our streets and public spaces to a state of peace, safety, and harmony, have gone a long way towards showing the people of this great nation what real leadership can achieve without the burdens and strains of a so-called 'divided government', and more importantly, what this country has lost and squandered away in the past few decades - no, the past century - by stubbornly clinging onto her old, bloated, confused, disordered, and dysfunctional 'constitutional compact', like it is some sacrosanct, inviolable object of worship, but no longer. At long last, we shall liberate our people from the chains and shackles of the gridlock and dysfunction of fractious, factional, partisan, class-based so-called 'law'. From now on, true law, good law, just law, the only law, shall flow from the unified, cohesive, integral, undivided Souverain - and from the will of that Souverain alone."

On 27 August 1988, that Law was put to a vote before a PNC that was in full attendance, and it passed by a vote margin of 644-216 - well beyond the threshold of 574 votes required to make amendments to the constitution by a two-thirds supermajority under Article 51, inclusive of its complete repeal. The Constitution Repeal Act was supported by all PNL Congressional legislators (522 votes), nearly three-quarters of all PDP lawmakers (74 votes), and slightly over half of all LPP legislators (48 votes). It was opposed by all CPP Members of Congress (137 votes), all lawmakers from the Purgation Libertarians (LP) and the Patriotic Front of Purgatio (PFP) (5 votes), as well as a minority of the PDP and LPP's elected lawmakers (74 votes).

Soon after the passage of the repeal of Purgatio's previous written constitution, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay enacted Executive Order (EO) No. 3113 of 1988 on the same day, which transformed Purgatio into a one-party state. It stated that all governmental offices and positions of public service and authority would, from thenceforth, only be available to PNL party members. It further provided that the Souverain of the realm - that being the Magnificus Dominus - would be the PNL's Secretary-General, as determined by the party's prevailing constitution and its Central Executive Committee (CEC). It prescribed a six-month transitional period for the law to take effect, during which time all holders of public office who were not already PNL party members would have to make applications to join the PNL party. If their applications were rejected, or if they failed to make such applications in the transitional period, then they would have to resign from their positions or risk expulsion from their offices accompanied with all resulting sanctions and penalties.

There was, however, one specific sector of government where the law was to take immediate effect, and that was for all the elected legislators of the PNC and government ministers in the Cabinet. All of the PDP and LPP Members of Congress who voted in favour of the recent Law were offered PNL party membership by virtue of EO 3113/1988, and if they so accepted that standing offer they would become formal party members with immediate effect. Likewise, all of the PDP party members who remained in the existing Coalition Cabinet were also offered PNL party membership with the same effect. However, the remaining 216 Members of Congress who voted against the Law from the CPP, PDP, LPP, LP, and PFP parties were not only to be expelled from the PNC with immediate effect, but they were also to be imprisoned in concentration camps for "aiding and abetting insurrection against the Royaume, sedition, treason, subversion against the State, and for their complicity in, and accessorial liability for, Communist violent insurgency, Marxist-Leninist guerrilla partisan terrorism, and general agitation, instigation, and acts of sabotage against the Royaume, her Souverain, and all her official plenipotentiaries". EO 3113/1988 also created a new organisation tasked with operating the concentration camps (or les camps de concentration), namely, the PNL Inquisitorial Committee for Order and Security (PICOS) (or La Commission Inquisitoire pour l'Ordre et la Sécurité de la LNP (CIPOS)), formed under the banner and auspices of the PNL political party specifically, and to be empowered with a broad mandate to detect all 'political crimes' and 'crimes against the Royaume and her Souverain', detain them in concentration camps, and generally see to the day-to-day running and operation of those facilities. Moreover, Geneviève de la Fayette would be appointed the first ever High Inquisitor of PICOS.

Hence, without any warning on 27 August 1988, the very same day that EO 3113/1988 was signed and left the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus, Police officers who had been summarily appointed into the brand-new PICOS special law enforcement body by the High Inquisitor stormed and barricaded the PNC building in the midst of an ongoing legislative session and placed all 216 legislators named in EO 3113/1988 under arrest and detained them in small, cramped makeshift concentration camps hastily erected in the outskirts of Ravaliér. Numerous other party activists from their political parties - especially members of the CPP and suspected members of L'Épée du Peuple - would also come to be thrown into those same camps in the coming weeks and months, and most of them would perish by the close of October 1988 from a combination of torture, forced labour, malnutrition, overwork, and the camps' dangerous and unsanitary conditions.

On 30 August 1988, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay would enact another Executive Order (EO), re-organising the 17-member Purgation Cabinet into the 27-member Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) (or La Direction Exécutive de la Purgatio), composed of all of the PNL and former PDP Cabinet Ministers, but with the additional inclusion of the traditional police, prosecutorial, security, and military leaderships as well as the High Inquisitor of PICOS, Geneviève de la Fayette, the Director of the PIGC, Marin de la Trémouille, and the Commandant en Chef of the Purification Order, Delrico Charlet. Devona Moreau was also appointed as the new Justice Secretary, as the former occupant of that ministerial portfolio, Geneviève de la Fayette, had been tasked with organising and establishing the brand-new PICOS organ as its High Inquisitor, with an eye towards transforming that agency into Purgatio's most powerful and formidable secret police force across the nation. The EO clarified expressly that the Magnificus Dominus, as the Director-General of the EDP, would have the power to appoint and dismiss any person to and from the EDP Government, at his absolute discretion.

After the PNC had been cleansed of all of its non-PNL legislators, and the PNL's dominance over the legislative and executive branches had been secured, the PNL's coup d'état over Purgatio was finally secured by way of judicial fiat. On 5 September 1988, the Purgation Ministry of Justice, under its new Justice Secretary Devona Moreau, made use of the 'governmental reference' procedure to refer a question of law to the highest court of the land, the Supreme Court of Cassation of Purgatio (or La Cour Suprême de Cassation de la Purgatio). The referred question was simple - "In light of the Purgation National Congress's repeal of the former Constitution of the Republic of Purgatio, in its enactment of Le Loi sur le Rétablissement de l'Unité Nationale et l'Intégrité Politique du Royaume (the "Constitution Repeal Act") on 27 August 1988, what norm or principle now represents the highest constitutional law from which all other norms or laws within the Purgation legal jurisdiction derive their validity thereinafter?"

The Supreme Court of Cassation rendered its unanimous 13-0 judgment on 20 September 1988, in the case entitled In the Matter of the Reference of the Ministry of Justice No. 74 of 1988 (also abbreviated as "Re Ministry of Justice No. 74/1988"), authored by the Dame Juge de la Cour Suprême, Cateline d'Évreux, which held that in the absence of a written constitution, the 'highest constitutional norm' of the Purgation jurisdiction was deemed to be a new constitutional principle, to be recognised in the common law by the authoritative pronouncement of the courts from thereon - that is, the brand-new constitutional principle of le principe du chef.

As the Supreme Court of Cassation's judgment would explain, le principe du chef or the 'leader principle' stood for the proposition that the Purgation legal order was bounded together and organised by the cohesive direction provided by its leader, the Magnificus Dominus, and hence the coordination and harmonisation of all acts and norms across the jurisdiction centred around the nexus and locus of the Magnificus Dominus and that of his will made law. It followed, therefore, that all legal norms owed their ultimate validity to the will of the Magnificus Dominus, as expressed through his every legislative instrument. These included legislation passed by the Purgation National Congress (PNC) and assented to by the Magnificus Dominus, Executive Orders (EO) signed and issued by the Magnificus Dominus, departmental policies, circulars, and guidances promulgated by the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus, ministerial orders and policies enacted by individual members of the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) who were acting under a delegated authority from the Magnificus Dominus by virtue of his appointing them to that position, or the creation of 'common law' or 'judge-made law' by the Purgation Judiciary, with the judge acting under a similar delegated authority of the Magnificus Dominus in his judicial pronouncements by virtue of his judicial appointment. In each of these instances of law-making, the new norms generated all owed their ultimate legal validity to the expressed will of the Magnificus Dominus. Hence, the will of the Magnificus Dominus took precedence and priority over every other legal norm within the Purgation jurisdiction, resting upon the ultimate highest constitutional principle - le principe du chef - which designated the Magnificus Dominus as the ultimate source of all law within the jurisdiction, by virtue of his status as the 'leader' charged with organising, structuring, and coordinating all disparate acts and behaviours across the legal order to be tailored and directed towards a common, integrated will, in attainment of social objectives or collective benefits that could not otherwise be achieved in the absence of such communal or collaborative action under the coordinative superintendence of le chef, of the 'leader'.

The Supreme Court of Cassation's judgment cited the Second Reading speech of the Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle to vindicate its holding that the legislative intent behind the Constitution Repeal Act had been to abrogate any prior constitutional norms which inferior norms within the Purgation jurisdiction previously could not otherwise be permitted to contradict or violate, in favour of substituting that old constitutional framework with the cohesive and harmonised vision of a unified Souverain, the Magnificus Dominus, who would now have the latitude and freedom to re-order all norms within the Purgation jurisdiction accordingly from thereon. "And thus," the judgment concluded, "the legislative intent animating that Law must reasonably be construed as such, to establish in substitution for Purgatio's prior codified constitution this new ultimate constitutional rule of le principe du chef, that is, that the leader's will must be said to enjoy a position of normative precedence and primacy over any other written or unwritten laws and all governmental actions and conduct, for the normative validity of all norms or rules in this constitutional order must from thenceforth ultimately be derived and divined from, and necessarily found and identified in, that same will, when the emergence of any such norms have been traced all the way back to their original, historical primary root, thereby emanating in common from the will of a unified, cohesive, singular, integrated Souverain" (see, Re Ministry of Justice No. 74/1988 at [63]).

With that definitive recognition of the constitutional principle of le principe du chef by the Supreme Court of Cassation of Purgatio, the PNL's coup d'état and take-over of the Purgation government was thereby complete, in law, with the nation thoroughly re-made and re-born from a liberal constitutional republic to a one-party fascist autocratic dictatorship, one that was entirely under the control of the PNL party and its party leadership.

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 11:28 pm

Road to Genocide of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel (1988-1999)

On 7 October 1988, the Director of the PIGC, Marin de la Trémouille, announced that the Purgation national DNA database had succeeded in analysing roughly 480 million genetic profiles - estimated to be slightly under half of the Purgation adult population at the time - and the PIGC was ready to establish an algorithm classifying the genetic profiles into two main categories - the 'genetically healthy' (Génétiquement Sain) on the one hand, and the 'genetically disordered' (Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel) on the other. In coordination with data received from the Purgation Police Force (PPF), PICOS, and even the Purification Order, the PIGC had been working on classifying its genetic materials into two classes based on what it termed 'phenotypical expressions of antisocial behaviours, deviant proclivities, and/or parasitical tendencies unfit for proper integration into a healthy and productive community' versus everyone else for whom such 'phenotypical expressions' were absent.

In the PIGC's definition, an 'antisocial, deviant, and/or parasitical disposition' was construed as a very broad category, and included 'vandals' (referring to hooligans, rioters, delinquents, terrorists, criminals, gangsters, and any persons engaged in such other antisocial or disorderly behaviour), 'cripples' (meaning the physically and mentally disabled), 'vagrants' (referring to the homeless, panhandlers, travellers, wanderers, vagabonds, or anyone roaming about public spaces without any visible means of self-support or self-maintenance), 'work-shy moochers and leeches' (persons who were persistently unemployed, not self-sufficient or self-reliant in the long run, or were dependent upon welfare and/or charity for their upkeep for prolonged periods of time), the 'insane and unsound' (people who were regarded as psychologically disordered), the 'addled and incontinent' (persistent substance abusers or persons deemed chronically dependent on psychoactive substances, such as psychoactive drugs, nicotine, or alcohol), the 'indolent and slothful' (in reference to the morbidly obese), and the 'imbecilic, retarded, and feeble-minded' (anyone who was intellectually impaired or had a very low IQ of below 70). Such persons were deemed to be 'genetically disordered', having a biological or genetic constitution which tended towards socially harmful or unproductive behaviours and traits, whereas everyone else was considered 'genetically healthy'.

The PIGC then made use of forensic epidemiology to compare the genetic profiles in the former classification against the genetic profiles in the latter, to identify 'repeat deviations' or 'allelic patterns' - in other words, gene sequences which were significantly statistically more likely to be present in one class but not the other. These 'genetic variations' were aggregated and agglomerated into a metadata algorithmic model which was, in theory, supposed to predict the relative likelihood of a given individual's genetic profile being indicative of a 'genetically healthy' profile (which, ostensibly, would not tend towards antisocial, deviant, and/or parasitical traits or behaviours) or a 'genetically disordered' one (which, allegedly, would). Any DNA profile which indicated an unusually high likelihood or probability of being 'genetically disordered' would be classified as such, which the PIGC estimated to be approximately 14-16% of all the genetic profiles within the entire Purgation population.

Thus, the Director of the PIGC promulgated PIGC Order No. 86 of 1988, also known as the "Genetic Identification Ordinance", which established the national DNA database's predictive algorithm, which he referred to as the Auspex Operandi, into law. All residents of Purgatio would be required to submit their genetic materials into the Auspex Operandi if they have not already done so, and the PPF, PICOS, and Purification Order were to assist in the nationwide enforcement of that requirement. All residents would be issued with national photo ID cards with biometric identifiers, and barcodes encoded with data corresponding to their genetic profile in the Auspex Operandi. The barcode could be scanned to determine the card-holder's basic identifying information, and most importantly, whether they were registered in the Auspex Operandi as 'genetically healthy' or 'genetically disordered'. In the view of the PIGC, as more and more genetic materials were collected and then fed into the DNA database, and as more and more antisocial persons manifested their 'disordered' tendencies in their behaviour, the Auspex Operandi algorithmic model was supposed to get more and more accurate and refined over time in its predictions.

The next day, the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) would implement Executive Order (EO) No. 3659 of 1988, promulgated by the Magnificus Dominus on 8 October 1988. EO 3659/1988 made it a criminal offence for persons to fail or refuse to provide their DNA materials into the national DNA database, and made it mandatory for all persons to carry their national photo ID card (which could only be obtained from the PIGC on provision of their DNA) on their person in public at all times, and empowered the PPF and PICOS to conduct random door-to-door searches or 'stop and searches' in any public spaces to demand that randomly selected persons present their photo ID cards for inspection, with the aim of identifying any persons who had failed to register their genetic profiles with the PIGC. Most significantly, EO 3659/1988 clarified that persons found to have "wilfully and deliberately" refused genetic registration would be presumptively classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel (until or unless proven otherwise by the application of the Auspex Operandi algorithm), and authorised the PPF and PICOS to determine the "appropriate response to any such failure of genetic registration in their absolute discretion", inclusive of forcible extraction of their DNA materials, detention in a concentration camp, and even the use of lethal or deadly force to apprehend such persons or prevent their escape from custody. This broad immunity was extended even to "private persons operating under an auxiliary force working in concert or conjunction with the investigative or enforcement efforts of uniformed officers of the PPF and/or the PICOS", which was a clear reference to the paramilitary volunteer soldiers in the Purification Order.

On 16 October 1988, the PNC legislature re-convened as Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette moved Le Loi pour la Préservation de la Liberté Génétique et l'Avancement de la Transparence des Informations Génétiques or "The Law for the Preservation of Genetic Freedom and the Promotion of the Transparency of Genetic Information", often referred to as the "Genetic Information Act" for short. That Law clarified that every person would have the right, in law, to request information regarding whether another person's genetic status was categorised as 'genetically healthy' or 'genetically disordered' under the Auspex Operandi, and provided that "nothing in law, written or unwritten, shall be construed as depriving any person of their absolute prerogative and privilege to determine, as a matter of their own personal choice and exercise of individual freedom, that they shall condition the performance of any act for, or extension of any benefit, advantage, or privilege to, any other person, upon the contingency that that other person shall hold, or not hold, a particular genetic classification of their own preference". The Première Législatrice Jeanne-Emmanuelle described the proposed Law in her Second Reading speech as a "common-sense measure to promote freedom of information, personal choice, and the free private ordering of people's individual lives", arguing that that Law was "not about discrimination but about freedom of choice, pure and simple". She added that the proposed Law was "a defensive and pre-emptive measure", designed to assure Purgation citizens that they would not have to fear the prospect of "frivolous spiteful litigation or other such retaliatory measures" if they exercised "their personal choice to prefer to associate with persons classified as, for example, Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, or they wished not to associate with persons classified as Génétiquement Sain". She also made a light-hearted and jocular remark in her speech, to the bemused laughter of many in the legislative chamber at the time, that "as someone whose classification has come back as 'genetically healthy', I can tell you that I would not personally be offended if someone didn't want to sleep with me, marry me, or start a family with me, just because they didn't want to do so with someone who was 'genetically healthy' and not 'genetically disordered', that's their right after all, and it's really not my place to tell them otherwise. This isn't rocket-science, it's plain common-sense!"

On 17 October 1988, the Genetic Information Act was passed into law by the PNC by a margin of 488-0, with 152 absentees. Soon after the passage of that Act, various Purgation media outlets began to run sensationalist stories and eye-catching headlines claiming to be re-publishing the anecdotal accounts of ordinary Purgation citizens claiming to have suffered various misdeeds and injuries from Dysfonctionnel individuals. Many of these media sources were either tabloids, broadsheets, other daily newspapers, or televised news channels owned and controlled by two prominent business empires in the country, the Courvoisier media empire (under the Rising Dawn Press Holdings Company Limited group of companies) and the De Sablé media empire (under La Société des Nouvelles Créations (Compagnie Financière) corporate family), which was notable as both the Courvoisier and De Sablé families had been prominent donors to the PNL party back in their 1981 and 1987 general election campaigns. Right-wing tabloids such as La Petite Auxiliorienne and La Voix du Royaume ran sensationalist stories and anecdotal accounts from members of the public claiming that they had been the victims of all manners of antisocial behaviours from a person whom they later discovered was registered as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel.

A group of underage teenage girls claimed in a story that ran on the front pages of Le Courrier Purgatien on 23 October 1988 that a much older man had propositioned them for sex whilst they were strolling about on the streets of Ravaliér the night before and, upon learning of their true ages, attempted to offer them money in exchange for their sexual services, following which they alerted their local volunteer fighters in the Purification Order, who beat the man to death and then discovered from his ID card that he was indeed Dysfonctionnel. A father in his mid-fifties would allege in another story that made the front pages of Nous Sommes Tannés! on 30 October 1988 that a pair of juvenile delinquents made lewd and obscene remarks on the street to his wife before slapping her behind, which prompted him to lose control, punch them, and restrain them, before handing them over to his local PICOS officers. He claimed in his account that he recently learnt from PICOS that the pair were unregistered and when their genetic materials were forcibly extracted and sent into the Auspex Operandi for profiling, they were registered into the system and subsequently discovered to be Dysfonctionnel as well. A businessman in Limogens who owned and operated a small local café would make another claim in Le Journal de l'Ouest on 2 November 1988 that he had taken the 'risk' of hiring a young man to work as his cashier despite his photo ID indicating that he was Dysfonctionnel, only to realise far too late that that employee had been stealing money from the cash register for over a month before running off and disappearing with the stolen monies. A conveyancing lawyer in Lyons would volunteer another anecdotal story to L'Homme Couronné on 5 November 1988 claiming that she had likewise taken the 'risk' of engaging a real estate agent in a conveyancing transaction for her client without conducting any checks to ascertain the agent's genetic status, who then absconded with the sale proceeds once her client's home had been sold off. She also alleged that that agent was found to be Dysfonctionnel after her local Purification Order paramilitaries tracked her down and apprehended her at the airport in Auxiliora, attempting to flee the country.

The veracity or authenticity of such accounts was often difficult to verify and ascertain, given their isolated and anecdotal character. However, the sheer volume of such accounts being released in the tabloid and broadsheet press, coupled with the shocking and attention-grabbing nature of such stories, all but guaranteed that such tales would be widely shared and republished and hence could freely percolate throughout the mainstream press to garner a very broad audience. Although the PIGC never released any official peer-reviewed studies examining whether, across-the-board, there was any general trend of Dysfonctionnel persons committing more crimes, the Director of the PIGC, Marin de la Trémouille, would often issue unofficial remarks to the press which the media would quote and publish alongside these anecdotal reports about the alleged conduct of certain Dysfonctionnel persons, in which he would express his own view that such 'troubling' stories being shared en masse in the mass media sphere 'underscored the seminal importance of erring on the side of caution and performing proper comprehensive genetic checks in such sensitive situations, in the interest of prudence'.

The Purgation government abstained, at first, from promulgating any formal regulatory measures which mandated or prescribed any official discrimination against the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel in law. However, the climate of fear and suspicion cultivated against Dysfonctionnel persons in the mainstream press by an inundating wave of such negative reporting, coupled with the Genetic Information Act which was recently enacted by the PNC and which purported to merely 'make available' to individuals the right to access information about a person's genetic classification, meant that the task of implementing widespread systemic discrimination against the Dysfonctionnel had effectively been delegated and outsourced to the private sector and private individuals. Many prominent financial institutions such as La Banque Royale d'Auxiliora, Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon, La Banque Purgatienne de Valentinois, and Le Crédit Industriel de la Société Commerciale de la Couronne issued various public statements in November to December 1988, announcing that they would be denying most housing loans, overdraft facilities, and credit card facilities to persons unable to provide proof that they have been classified as 'genetically healthy', and that only a small number of short-term, high-interest loans would remain available to 'genetically disordered' customers, citing the supposed 'higher credit risk' associated with the latter class of borrowers. Many rental companies began to enact similar corporate policies, requiring a person to show evidence of a Génétiquement Sain genetic classification before renting an apartment to them, or only offering leases to the 'genetically disordered' if they were willing to pay a larger deposit and/or live in separate apartment buildings reserved only for other 'disordered' tenants situated on the outskirts of cities (to avoid living in proximity to the 'genetically healthy' tenants). Major companies such as Les Laboratoires de Corday, Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon, Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac, Les Investissements Commerciaux de Marais, and La Société des Nouvelles Créations (Compagnie Financière) began to announce from November 1988 onwards that they would no longer be hiring or promoting any employees to a managerial or executive position without national identification evidencing that they were registered as Génétiquement Sain, and they would similarly be conducting genetic checks on their existing management and terminating the employment of any corporate officer discovered to be either unregistered or Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel.

Soon enough, on 17 December 1988, the nation's oldest and most prestigious university, L'Université de Savoy-Ducasse, saw its Chancellor issue a formal public statement that it would be denying admission to any students of a Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel genetic classification, and would require all future applicants to produce proof of their Auspex Operandi registration records for such checks to be performed, describing it as a 'deeply difficult and troubling decision for the University to make, but ultimately, we are of the view that maintaining a safe and secure learning environment for all our students must be deemed to be of paramount importance to us all'. A few days later, on 21 December 1988, the second oldest university in the country, the equally prestigious L'Université de Pétrus, issued a similar announcement that it would be adopting the same admissions criteria. Top private schools in the country including L'Académie d'Excellence Scolaire de Savoy-Ducasse and L'École de la Fondation d'Amboise pour les Prodiges followed suit and issued similar announcements that it would cease to take in any more students of a Dysfonctionnel genetic status. And by the end of the year, on 31 December 1988, one of the country's oldest Inns of Court which controlled and regulated admission into the nation's legal profession - La Vénérable Association de la Pivoine Rose - announced that as part of its 'fit and proper person' checks, it would adopt the view that a pupil of a Dysfonctionnel genetic classification was not a 'fit and proper person' to be admitted to the Bar, with many other Inns of Court swiftly adopting a similar policy in the subsequent weeks and months.

As the discrimination against the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel ramped up across the nation and quickly increased in scale and intensity across various spheres of public life, a new civil society and human rights organisation, calling itself the Genetic Equality Movement (GEM) (or Le Mouvement pour l'Égalité Génétique (MEG)), came to be founded on 1 January 1990, consisting of over 80,000 founding members, all bearing a Dysfonctionnel genetic status, with the stated aim in its articles of association of 'dispelling myths and pushing back against various demonising stereotypes about the so-called 'genetically disordered', raising awareness about the status of our community, and striving for our equal inclusion and acceptance in Purgation society at large'. The GEM experienced rapid growth, and by the close of 31 January 1990, its registered membership numbers exceeded 16 million persons.

The PNL Government initially adopted an ambivalent view of the GEM organisation. The Media and Culture Secretary Marquisa de Taillefer registered the organisation on 1 January 1990 without much resistance and the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay himself even made a statement in an interview dated 6 January 1990, in response to a journalist asking him for his thoughts on the GEM, that he 'welcomed a diversity of views and perspectives on this challenging debate about the problem of the Dysfonctionnel, an issue on which there are a multitude of strong emotions on both sides, on many sides, all of which, I believe, must be heard sincerely and respected'. Some members of the EDP, however, were more vocally critical about the organisation. The High Inquisitor of PICOS Geneviève de la Fayette referred to them as a 'band of savage hooligans and worthless troublemakers' and the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet even urged for the GEM to be classified as a 'criminal organisation' and called for its members to be 'exterminated like cockroaches for the safety and well-being of the Royaume'. Nevertheless, the GEM would, at least initially, retain its legal and recognised status under Purgation law.

The first piece of discriminatory legislation against the Dysfonctionnel, however, would soon come to be debated and enacted by the EDP Government on 16 February 1990. High Inquisitor Geneviève proposed the issuance of Executive Order (EO) No. 41 of 1990 on 5 February 1990, which she entitled the "Decree on the Protection of Healthy Bloodlines and the Preservation of the Social Integrity of the Genetic Quality of the Nation". Shortly after she proposed EO 41/1990, over the course of the next two weeks, PICOS officers and Purification Order paramilitaries held large rallies and marches in which free copies of Geneviève's treatise La Solution Finale were distributed to crowds, as Geneviève and her allies (which included PIGC Director Marin and Commandant en Chef Delrico) gave speeches to thronged members of the public, preaching the message that Purgatio's economic and social woes were attributable to the 'genetic contamination' of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, due to a problem of 'dysgenics'. According to Geneviève and her allies, the unchecked procreation of the Dysfonctionnel over more than a century had the effect of 'weakening' the Purgation gene-pool and allowing the parasitical tendencies of the Dysfonctionnel - such as criminality, indolence, and other 'unfit' characteristics - to 'pollute' and 'invade' the bloodlines of the 'genetically healthy' through inter-mixing, resulting in 'contamination of the blood' and the 'perpetuation of perverse and dysfunctional tendencies across the community'. According to Geneviève and her allies, everything from the Great Recession to the recent uptick of violent and gang-related crime was attributable to this problem of 'dysgenics', because the 'unchecked reproduction' of the Dysfonctionnel throughout the Purgation populace had resulted in a growing number of criminals, delinquents, lazy and indolent persons who were unfit to work and drained and burdened the nation's welfare and social services, thereby contributing to the nation's economic and social decline. The High Inquisitor thus presented EO 41/1990 as an urgent measure needed to 'arrest the degeneration of this nation' by 'containing and quarantining the pathologies and perversities of the Dysfonctionnel from spreading further within our society'; otherwise, she warned, Purgatio would be doomed to experience the same economic malaise and waves of violent criminality as before.

Under the slogan of "Protect Our Future!", PICOS and the Purification Order helmed a nationwide campaign intended to put increasing pressure on the government to enact EO 41/1990, with a thronged crowd of an estimated 400-500,000 demonstrators gathered in Ravaliér on 16 February 1990, surrounding the building of the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) on the date when the EDP was due to discuss and debate EO 41/1990, chanting the words "Protégez Notre Avenir!" repeatedly and in unison. Following the EDP's meeting, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette signed and promulgated an amended version of EO 41/1990. The original version proposed by the High Inquisitor had prohibited all marriage, procreation, and sexual intercourse between the Génétiquement Sain and Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, and limited the latter to having no more than two children in their entire lifetime. However, the final version of EO 41/1990 only prohibited all marriage and procreation between the two genetic classes. It annulled all existing marriages between the two groups, clarified that any future inter-marriages would be null and void in law, and made it a criminal offence to intentionally or recklessly contract any marriage or procure any conception between a 'genetically healthy' and a 'genetically disordered' person. Enabling clauses were also included in EO 41/1990, empowering the PPF, PICOS, and the Purification Order to take 'all necessary measures' to detect and punish violations of EO 41/1990.

EO 41/1990 was only the beginning of a slew of increasingly discriminatory measures which began to formally exclude the Dysfonctionnel from more and more aspects of civic and public life, in law. Soon after, the EDP Government promulgated Executive Order (EO) No. 138 of 1990, or the "Decree on the Defence and Preservation of the Integrity of the Public Service", on 27 February 1990, which prohibited any Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel from holding any positions in the Professional Civil Service and "any position of public office or public service more generally", such as teachers and nurses in government-run schools and hospitals, soldiers in the Purgation Armed Forces (PAF), and police officers in the Purgation Police Force (PPF). Individual government ministries and departments also began conducting massive department-wide checks and identity verifications to detect the genetic status of its employees, and it has been estimated that in the following months, over 35 million employees of Dysfonctionnel classification were summarily drummed out of their positions and lost their jobs without severance or notice. The Cabinet Secretary of the Home Civil Service, Eugène-León de la Garde de Chambonas, would issue a public statement on 1 March 1990 praising the enactment of EO 138/1990, describing that measure as a 'badly needed reform necessary to ensure that our national public services remain in touch with the anxieties and sentiments of the ground' and a 'step in the right direction to gradually win back public trust and confidence in the Civil Service as an institution of honesty, probity, and integrity'.

The response from the GEM to discriminatory laws such as EO 41/1990 and EO 138/1990 was swift and negative. The President of the GEM, Clément Languet, and its Executive Director, Brigitte Clairvaux, both condemned the laws as acts of oppression and persecution targeting the Dysfonctionnel for discrimination and exclusion, and on 3 March 1990 they issued a joint press statement promising swift retaliation through a 'programme of massive nationwide resistance and civil disobedience to draw this nation's attention to this intolerable injustice', declaring that the GEM would maintain its 'policy of resistance' until the PNL Government repealed its discriminatory laws and enacted 'human rights and equality legislation' protecting the Dysfonctionnel community from further discrimination in law.

That announcement was indeed followed-up by a spate of disruptive protests and demonstrations organised by the GEM, designed to disturb and disrupt various public events to draw attention to the GEM's championed cause of seeking equality between the Sain and Dysfonctionnel genetic classes of society. Across March and April of 1990, GEM protestors blocked major roadways, thoroughfares, and walkways, occupied major parks, beaches, gardens, and other public recreational spaces, vandalised famous monuments and buildings, surrounded and picketed public events, and conducted 'sit-in protests' to occupy and shutdown certain institutions and organisations which the GEM objected to. The GEM targeted organisations and events which its members associated with the recent spate in genetic discrimination against the Dysfonctionnel, including events hosted by the PNL party, the PICOS secret police force, Purification Order rallies, and events hosted by companies, schools, universities, professional bodies, and other societies which had implemented discriminatory or exclusionary policies against the Dysfonctionnel. On 14 March 1990, the GEM's student activists and community leaders staged massive demonstrations which disrupted and shutdown classes and lectures in L'Université de Savoy-Ducasse to protest its exclusion of prospective Dysfonctionnel students. On 25 March 1990, the GEM stormed the premises of L'Hôpital de la Fondation Éloi, a private hospital in Provence which had followed the government's lead in EO 138/1990 by firing over 28 nurses and doctors found to have a Dysfonctionnel genetic classification amongst its staff, occupying and shutting down the hospital for four days until the police intervened and ejected all protestors on the 28th of March. On 5 April 1990, the GEM's protestors blocked a massive 26-lane freeway interchange in Ravaliér, shutting down the roads for the whole day through a series of sit-downs, lie-ins, and 'slow walking' demonstrations, resulting in a huge traffic blockage and obstruction which affected over 200,000 vehicles until the traffic authorities intervened to clear out the GEM demonstrators. On 11 April 1990, more than 180 GEM activists stormed La Musée de la Croix in Auxiliora and vandalised numerous artworks, paintings, and sculptures, in protest of the support shown by the Board of Trustees of L'Institut Purgatien des Arts et de la Culture for the PNL Government and its recent policy to remove all 'politically sensitive' artworks which had either been made by Dysfonctionnel artists or which had portrayed the PNL Government and its recent anti-Dysfonctionnel policies in a negative and/or embarrassing light. And on 16 April 1990, the GEM held a massive demonstration involving more than 10,000 protestors which surrounded the headquarters of Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon in Avidité, demanding that the bank end its discriminatory company policies against Dysfonctionnel customers, borrowers, and employees, picketing the establishment by surrounding the building, blocking all entrances and exits, and prohibiting customers, workers, contractors, and suppliers from entering the bank's headquarters.

PNL-aligned media outlets, especially the tabloids and news channels owned and controlled by the Courvoisier and De Sablé media empires, seized upon the disruptive demonstrations and civil disobedience tactics of the GEM to castigate the Dysfonctionnel community as a whole as a perverse and dysfunctional community, exhibiting antisocial and socially obstructive tendencies which held up and obstructed Purgation society and burdened the Purgation people. PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille gave a famous interview with the Courvoisier-owned Halcyon News Network (HNN) on 2 April 1990, expressing the view that the disruptive actions of the GEM 'proved clearly and unequivocally, beyond a shadow of any residual doubt, that the PIGC was correct in identifying such persons as degenerative, obstructive, and burdensome to the community, biologically speaking, of course', going so far as to claim that 'with such antisocial behaviours as these rife and rampant within our society, is it any wonder at all that this country suffered a painful Great Recession and had to endure a recent uptick in organised crime and syndicated racketeering plaguing our urban areas and inner-cities?' And the High Inquisitor of PICOS, Geneviève de la Fayette, was even more explicit during her public appearance on the De Sablé-owned Les Potins du Matin on 17 April 1990, in claiming that the GEM's disruptive protests 'unequivocally displayed the dysfunctional, destructive, parasitical orientation of all the Dysfonctionnel', and suggesting that the EDP Government's recent policies 'did not go nearly far enough to protect public safety and safeguard public order in this nation', and promising that she and PICOS would do 'everything in our power to get our streets back under control and clear out our roads and public spaces of all unruly, disruptive, and disorderly elements, so ordinary Purgations can live their lives in peace and harmony once more'.

Hence, when the GEM staged a sit-in protest lasting from 25-30 April 1990 involving the forcible entry into, and occupation of, a prestigious private high school - viz., L'Académie d'Excellence Scolaire de Savoy-Ducasse - which was intended to protest the school's refusal to admit Dysfonctionnel student applicants who passed the school's strict entrance examinations, it ended up disrupting classes, experiments, high school sporting competitions, and various national examinations, and also resulted in violence breaking out between GEM protestors and various high school students and their parents and teachers. The PICOS secret police force responded swiftly, putting down the GEM demonstration with brutal force, making sweeping arrests of the protest's organisers with more than 180 persons being apprehended, beaten, tortured, and thrown into PICOS-operated concentration camps. High Inquisitor Geneviève would speak out on 29 April 1990 to condemn 'GEM terrorism and violence' for 'politicising the classroom and making victims of our children and their education'.

On 1 May 1990, PICOS and the Purification Order would retaliate by announcing a nationwide boycott of Dysfonctionnel businesses and products. PICOS officers and Purification Order paramilitaries marched about the streets of Savoy-Ducasse across the month of May 1990, identifying all institutions and organisations either owned, in whole or in part, by Dysfonctionnel persons, or which employed Dysfonctionnel persons in prominent leadership or public-facing positions, by painting words like Les Parasites! and Les Cafards et les Rongeurs! on entrances, windows, and archways, vandalising and defacing the building, and smashing its doors and windows, harassing workers and stopping, searching, and intensely questioning and interrogating any members of the public attempting to enter and patronise such establishments. This city-wide boycott began in Savoy-Ducasse due to the recent events involving the disruption of classes at L'Académie d'Excellence Scolaire de Savoy-Ducasse but quickly spread to Pétrus, Provence, and Ravaliér in the subsequent weeks and months. Over 75,000 businesses in Ravaliér were smashed and vandalised by PICOS and the Purification Order from May-June 1990, and tens of thousands of Dysfonctionnel business owners or employees were harassed, pestered, or seized and beaten on the streets in broad daylight. Both PICOS and the Purification Order would also openly incite their own supporters to boycott Dysfonctionnel-owned businesses, file complaints en masse to banks to pressure them to withdraw banking, lending, and credit card payment facilities to such enterprises said to be owned or controlled by Dysfonctionnel persons, and write letters and send petitions to companies and organisations which employed Dysfonctionnel persons in leadership roles to demand their immediate retrenchment and expulsion.

The boycott campaign and the disruption and disorder which had preceded it prompted the PNL Government to act. The High Office of the Magnificus Dominus would issue a formal statement on 8 June 1990 promising that the Magnificus Dominus was 'looking into redressing the present situation, being cognisant of the outrage and anxieties of many Purgations worried about their futures and the well-being of their children and families', assuring them that the 'Executive Directorate will be taking swift and decisive action to calm their fears and assuage their justified anger over the recent spate of lawlessness and anarchy recently ignited across the country'. On 11 June 1990, the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) would enact Executive Order (EO) No. 287 of 1990, which expelled all Dysfonctionnel persons from all licensed professional bodies, and prohibited the admission of any Dysfonctionnel persons in future into professional bodies for regulated avocations and callings, such as barristers, solicitors, physicians, psychiatrists, dentists, chartered accountants, notaries public, architects, engineers, and the like. The situation would escalate when, on 20 June 1990, the Purgation National Congress (PNC) enacted a sweeping empowering legislation proposed by its Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette, known as the "Law for the Restoration of the Public Square and the Efficacious Redress of Dysfonctionnel Vandalism and Agitation", which passed its Third Reading by a margin of 274-0. That Law, also often referred to by historians and academics as the "Enabling of Anti-Dysfonctionnel Exclusion Act" for short, stated simply that all Ministers in the EDP and all heads of any governmental ministries, governmental departments, public institutions, and regulatory bodies and agencies, would be given the regulatory power to "enact any and all measures whatsoever deemed to be necessary and/or beneficial, within the spheres of their institutional competencies, for the purposes of limiting, controlling, restricting, and/or suppressing any actual or potential riotous and/or disorderly acts of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel or the risk of any such acts of such persons disturbing the public peace or disrupting public order". The Magnificus Dominus signed that Act into law on 21 June 1990, which was to take immediate effect.

From June to August of 1990, governmental ministries and departments engaged in a policy 'arms race' of appearing to compete with each other to outdo other public bodies in enacting new policies and regulations in exercise of the sweeping new powers granted in the recent Enabling of Anti-Dysfonctionnel Exclusion Act. On 21 June 1990, the Ministry of Education enacted Education Ministry Order No. 331 of 1990, which created a new mandatory curriculum for primary schools and secondary schools across the country known as "Genetic Integrity Education" intended to educate students on the dangers and menaces posed by persons of a Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel origin, which included the treatise La Solution Finale as mandatory reading. The next day, on 22 June 1990, the Ministry then enacted Education Ministry Order No. 339 of 1990, which rolled-out a plan for Dysfonctionnel children to be incrementally expelled and phased-out of most public schools in densely-populated metropolitan areas, on the pretext of redressing an 'overcrowding' of the public school system. On 23 June 1990, the Media and Culture Ministry enacted Media and Culture Ministry Order No. 188 of 1990, which amended the prevailing Code of Conduct governing all media and entertainment outlets, prohibiting any publications which 'promoted, encouraged, or portrayed in a positive or sympathetic light, acts of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel that tend towards a disturbance and/or disruption of public peace and/or public order". On 29 June 1990, the Home Office promulgated Home Office Order No. 516 of 1990, which revoked the long-term visas of any foreign nationals of a Dysfonctionnel genetic constitution, mandated genetic checks for all future visa applications, and granted the Home Secretary sweeping new powers to revoke the Purgation citizenship of any Dysfonctionnel, naturalised or non-naturalised, where such revocation is deemed to be 'conducive to the furtherance of national welfare and well-being'. On 3 July 1990, the Interior Department promulgated Interior Department Order No. 112 of 1990, creating new 'municipal maps' designating 'out-of-bound' areas for the Dysfonctionnel in the most densely populated cities in the country, namely Ravaliér, Provence, Poisson, Limogens, Pétrus, and Savoy-Ducasse, with the 'out-of-bound' areas generally being public parks, beaches, recreational areas, children's playgrounds, shopping malls and popular shopping centres and marketplaces, and the like. On 15 July 1990, the Conseil Royal des Arts announced a broad new censorship policy known as Le Code Réglementaire National des Arts which prohibited any works of art which had either been created by an auteur that was Dysfonctionnel or which otherwise depicted Dysfonctionnel persons or behaviours except 'in any negative portrayal which can only be reasonably interpreted as implying censure, condemnation, and/or denigration of such persons and/or conduct' from being exhibited in museums, cinemas, opera-houses, and theatres across the nation, and established a new censorship board to scrutinise new artistic works and creations against such standards. On 16 July 1990, the Transport Ministry enacted Transport Ministry Order No. 280 of 1990, which prohibited Dysfonctionnel persons from using designated public transport networks during peak operating hours in certain major cities where those transport networks were identified by the Ministry as having been the recipients of a 'history of GEM disruption and disturbance of critical arteries of public transportation in the past'.

From 19-25 July 1990, PICOS and the PPF both established a slew of new curfews via municipal ordinances which prohibited the Dysfonctionnel from leaving their houses during designated hours in the early hours of the morning or late in the evening, with powers to 'stop and search' members of the public and demand their identification cards to enforce the curfews, and empowering private citizens to make 'citizen's arrests' of Dysfonctionnel persons found to be violating such curfews to be handed over to their local PICOS or PPF officer, to be sent to either prison or concentration camps. The Treasury announced on 26 July 1990 that it would be denying all government loans or assistance to any business found to be owned, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, by Dysfonctionnel proprietors, and the Commerce Ministry announced on 28 July 1990 that such businesses would also be barred from being a contractor or supplier to any public body and would no longer be awarded any new government contracts and concessions over any public works or projects in future. Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan announced on 6 August 1990 that no new passports would be issued to any persons of a Dysfonctionnel orientation and it would be made a criminal offence for a Dysfonctionnel person to retain their passport instead of surrendering it to the Home Office. The next day, on 7 August 1990, she promulgated Home Office Order No. 815 of 1990, which not only promulgated the prohibition on Dysfonctionnel owning or possessing passports, but empowered the Home Office to place any and all Dysfonctionnel persons on the 'no-fly list' and the 'terror watch list' to empower Purgation law enforcement and national security agencies to place them under strict pre-emptive surveillance and scrutiny, with expanded powers for national security and intelligence agencies to monitor their movements, whereabouts, expenses, associations, and communications. On 14 August 1990, the Labour Relations Department announced that all Dysfonctionnel persons would be prohibited from holding leadership positions in labour unions as foremen or executive committee members and would not be permitted to vote in union elections or ballots on any proposed industrial actions, and labour unions found to be in violation of that ban would face swift and immediate de-registration. On 18 August 1990, the Health Ministry promulgated Health Ministry Order No. 168 of 1990, providing that Dysfonctionnel persons would be ineligible for any governmental subsidies for any medical treatments for what were listed as 'ailments of election and/or lifestyle choices', including lung cancer, ephysema, atherosclerosis, liver cirrhosis, stroke, and diabetes. On 21 August 1990, the Welfare Department followed suit with Welfare Department Order No. 563 of 1990, which made Dysfonctionnel persons ineligible for unemployment benefits, job-seeker assistance, and limited the eligibility for child benefits to a maximum of two children per Dysfonctionnel applicant. The Justice Ministry topped that on 25 August 1990 with Justice Ministry Order No. 1115 of 1990, which made Dysfonctionnel persons ineligible for all criminal and civil legal aid. And on 29 August 1990, the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus would issue a policy circular to local councils and provincial administrations encouraging them to build segregated housing facilities reserved only for the Dysfonctionnel in far-away, isolated sections of municipalities and to ensure that Dysfonctionnel persons, as far as possible, would not reside in close proximity to the Génétiquement Sain in majorly populated city centres, and even amended EO 41/1990 on 31 August 1990 (via the promulgation of Executive Order (EO) No. 305 of 1990 or "EO 305/1990") to impose an expanded criminal prohibition upon all sexual relations or 'acts of sexual gratification or any and all libidinous or indecent conduct whatsoever, in public or in private' between the Sain and Dysfonctionnel, procreative or non-procreative, and irrespective of whether any offspring had been conceived or even could be conceived by such acts.

The GEM responded to the recent uptick in discriminatory legislation against the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel with further radicalisation, with the organisation's leadership under Clément Languet and Brigitte Clairvaux openly calling for 'forceful resistance to stand up and fight back' against the Purgation government and describing their community's state in the country as 'increasingly desperate and dire' in a joint public statement on 19 August 1990 and adding that 'we are not just second-class citizens, the government of the day has definitively and in no uncertain terms declared war upon our very existence in decree after decree after discriminatory decree' in another joint public statement on 27 August 1990. These statements culminated in enraged riots of frustrated and angry members of the Dysfonctionnel community, especially young men and women who had recently been classified as 'genetically disordered' and saw themselves suffer a serious and deleterious loss of opportunities in society as a result. These pent-up frustrations broiled over into demonstrations that turned rowdy and violent in deprived areas of heavily-populated inner cities across Purgatio, with violent rioting engulfing the cities of Pétrus from 4-9 September 1990, Savoy-Ducasse from 8-12 September 1990, Provence from 9-19 September 1990, and especially in Ravaliér from 14-27 September 1990, which proved to be far larger in scale than the PPF and PICOS were able to contain. All in all, it has been estimated that the 1990 Dysfonctionnel Riots claimed over 270 lives, left more than 3,500 persons injured, and saw more than 16,000 homes, vehicles, and business destroyed in a nationwide wave of looting, arson, vandalism, robbery, and mass assaults and batteries on a truly unprecedented scale.

In the wake of the rioting, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette ordered a mobilisation of the Purgation Armed Forces (PAF) and the sending of tanks and armoured vehicles to occupy the most heavily and densely-populated parts of Ravaliér on 30 September 1990, and authorised the Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger to order the PAF forces to use deadly force to quell and suppress any future violent incidents in the inner cities. In the wake of the heavy damage and destruction wrought upon the urban areas of the country in the aftermath of the recent bout of inner-city rioting, the extremists and hardliners in the EDP Government began to call for violent and pre-emptive action against the GEM and the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel community as a whole. High Inquisitor of PICOS Geneviève de la Fayette, in an interview with the far-right De Sablé-owned tabloid La Voix du Royaume on 2 October 1990, called for the GEM to be branded a 'terrorist organisation' and called for the GEM's entire leadership and all members of its executive committee, including and especially Brigitte Clairvaux and Clément Languet, to be arrested and executed for 'incitement of terrorism, insurrection, and rioting', claiming that the 'entire GEM has blood on its hands' and holding the organisation responsible and culpable for the recent riots. The Commandant en Chef of the Purification Order, Delrico Charlet, went further in his 5 October 1990 interview with the far-right Courvoisier-owned tabloid La Petite Auxiliorienne, claiming that the time had come for the PNL Government to 'declare war on the Dysfonctionnel vandals and parasites in our midst', calling them 'a swarm of worthless burdens, parasitical leeches, useless eaters, and cockroaches, we need a great cleansing in this nation, we need to arrest this country's swift decline and degenerative slide into anarchy, lawlessness, destruction, and disorder and finally restore the greatness of our people's potential, enough is enough with all this feckless and cowardly pussy-footing, the government needs to grow some fucking balls and put down all these mongrels, and for good'.

Under increasing pressure from PICOS, the Purification Order, and their right-wing supporters whose reactionary outrage came to be incensed and galvanised in the wake of the recent riots, the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus issued a decree on 10 October 1990 revoking the registration of the GEM and issuing arrest warrants for the GEM's entire leadership. The GEM was also classified as a 'criminal organisation', with membership in, or association with, the GEM being prescribed as a criminal offence. That same day, Clément Languet, Brigitte Clairvaux, and the GEM's entire leadership would go into hiding and flee to the outskirts of the country where PNL governmental control was generally weaker, their whereabouts unknown to the authorities.

The PPF, PICOS, and Purification Order engaged in a sweeping nationwide crackdown on the GEM, and over the month of October 1990 alone, over 40,000 persons (mostly of Dysfonctionnel classification, with some exceptions) were arrested on suspicion of being GEM agents or collaborators, and subjected to forced disappearances, secret prosecutions before 'security tribunals', torture in PICOS interrogations, and detention and forced labour in concentration camps. Numerous secret GEM meetings were discovered and disrupted as a result of governmental espionage, wiretapping, police 'tails' on suspected members, PICOS 'plants' and a wave of 'sting' operations, resulting in many more arrests of GEM members and supporters. PICOS and the Purgation security organisations' escalating crackdown on the GEM fuelled an increasing radicalisation of the organisation and its members, as the group had already lost any remaining legitimacy or tolerance it had previously enjoyed in the eyes of the Purgation government, its members began to mobilise and take up arms, organising themselves into a militant army which prepared itself to wage an insurgent guerrilla war against the PNL government. The GEM began to integrate and absorb socialist CPP fighters and militants who had fled to the outskirts of Purgatio following the PNL government's similar crackdown on the CPP and communist organisations back in 1988, many of whom had continued fighting a smaller-scale resistance against the ruling party of the day even after its core leadership had been liquidated and destroyed two years earlier. These former CPP fighters and former L'Épée du Peuple militants now shared a common enemy with the GEM and its Dysfonctionnel members, adding to the GEM's numbers and further preparing that organisation to wage its impending guerrilla insurgent war against the Purgation government and the PNL ruling party. Thus, by November 1990, it was estimated by the Purgation Security Service (PSS) that the GEM militia had anywhere between 450-600,000 fighters in its ranks, training and organising in secret in preparation for an upcoming larger-scale violent resistance against the ruling PNL regime.

Eventually, the inevitable civil war between the GEM and the Purgation government would begin in earnest on 18 November 1990, with GEM fighters and militants launching a string of guerrilla 'hit-and-run' attacks upon public institutions including police stations and government offices in the outlying provinces of Purgatio, namely the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan, quickly seizing control of the provincial capital cities of La Roche and Limogens by 21-22 November 1990. The Purgation Armed Forces (PAF), which consisted of over 2.5 million regular servicemen at the time, quickly mobilised and prepared to invade and occupy the outlying provinces, and began parachuting airborne forces and paratroopers into the cities of La Roche and Limogens from 30 November to 1 December of 1990, resulting in fierce street warfare between the PAF's elite rapid deployment units and GEM insurgents which only subsided when PAF tanks, armoured vehicles, and motorised infantry units arrived to occupy the inner city centres on 9 December 1990 and local armoured infantry garrisons arrived to relieve the city and to provide much-needed reinforcement and supportive fire. GEM fighters fled to the outlying townships and the rural outlying areas of the provinces of Villehardouin and Lusignan became hotbeds of insurgent activity which the PAF had great difficulty rooting-out and detecting through painstaking 'search and destroy' operations, city-by-city, municipality-by-municipality, a lengthy, drawn-out process which all but guaranteed that the Purgation Civil War between the Purgation government and the GEM insurgency would drag on for over a decade, with fighting between the PAF and GEM flaring up and subsiding periodically in the years to come.

In the midst of that violent and draining insurgency, three GEM operatives managed to sneak into a heavily-guarded PIGC research laboratory in Savoy-Ducasse and set off a deadly improvised explosive device (IED) on 16 January 1991, which killed 23 civilians, mostly PIGC scientists and researchers, and left nearly 200 more seriously wounded or critically injured. Amongst the dead was a sixteen-year-old high school student Xavier Marcel de la Falaise, eldest son of an esteemed, high-placed, highly respectable aristocratic family in Purgatio - La Maison de la Falaise - whose family members had dominated the leadership of numerous major artistic and cultural institutions across the nation for centuries, including the board of trustees and governors of L'Institut National du Patrimoine, La Fondation du Quenoy des Arts, Le Conseil Royal du Patrimoine, L'Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, and La Musée Royale d'Auxerre. The young Xavier had been at the PIGC on an internship for young researchers and had been on track to receive a prestigious full-ride merit-based scholarship from La Fondation Royale du Prince d'Auxiliora for his excellence displayed in the fields of genetics, human genomics, and biomedical research. That, coupled with the high-placed status of his family within Purgation high society, and the fact that his father Charles de la Falaise was on the board of trustees of Le Conseil Royal du Patrimoine and his mother Sophie de la Falaise (née de Muset) was a prominent donor and philanthropist to hundreds of museums and art galleries across the nation through her family foundation La Fondation Patrimoniale du Grand-Duc de Minière, pretty much ensured that the death of Xavier de la Falaise would become a huge cause célèbre for the Purgation political right and the far-right of the PNL party.

The next day, on 17 January 1991, PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille would issue a charged and incendiary public statement, calling Xavier's murder a 'most heartless and blood-thirsty massacre by mindless savages', listing out the boy's educational achievements and his prospective stellar career in the PIGC before concluding that 'it should now be clear beyond any doubt to all right-thinking Purgations that these Dysfonctionnel primates, like blood-sucking leeches and parasitical roaches, seem to know only how to ravage, deprive, and destroy, they robbed from our community a truly talented, bright, intelligent, amazingly conscientious young boy, because the Dysfonctionnel, being pathologically unable to produce or contribute anything in themselves, must necessarily resort to killing and destroying those who can just for a shred of meaning and relevance in their empty, useless, deeply unproductive lives'. The funeral for Xavier held by the De La Falaise family on 3 February 1991 in their hometown of Lyons also proved to be a highly publicised and politicised affair, with the footage of his mother Sophie breaking down into tears as her eulogy faded into incoherent sobs and his father Charles angrily calling for his son's memory to be honoured with a 'day of brutal reckoning' and pleading for 'the Furies to rain down holy revengeance upon the rabid Dysfonctionnel dogs of this nation' going viral as they were shared and televised to millions across the nation by the Purgation press. High Inquisitor Geneviève de la Fayette would capitalise upon the death of Xavier, holding massive rallies of PICOS officers and PNL rank-and-file party members under the banners of "Je suis Xavier!" and "Nous sommes Xavier!" in all major Purgation cities from 8-15 February 1991, as the Purification Order's Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet organised huge paramilitary parades and marches in Ravaliér with awe-inspiring spectacles of synchronised drills and coordinated military processions, in which he gave charged and widely publicised speeches to his paramilitary soldiers calling for 'remembrance and revengeance for Xavier and his family'.

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 11:31 pm

And that promised day of revengeance would come soon enough. In a brutal series of events which many in the Purgation media would call La Semaine de la Grande Revanche, which many commentators would speculate had the blessing of the Magnificus Dominus and the EDP Government behind closed doors, uniformed officers of PICOS and paramilitaries in the Purification Order would run wild and inflict a series of week-long devastating pogroms upon the Dysfonctionnel in all major metropolitan areas of the country from the night of 19 February lasting until the morning of 28 February 1991, roaming about the streets and going door-to-door to stab, assault, beat up, degrade, and humiliate any random members of the Dysfonctionnel community that PICOS and the Purification Order could get their hands on. The Purification Order's Youth Brigade, in particular, would be given a free hand to engage in acts of mass homicide, lynching, looting, arson, and the wanton burglarising, kidnapping, beating, stabbing, and mutilation of random Dysfonctionnel persons in their homes, vehicles, businesses, places of work, or out and about on the roads or in public spaces, with many Youth Brigade members even engaging in the wanton humiliation and degradation of Dysfonctionnel victims by forcing them to strip naked and crawl about on all fours in broad daylight in public spaces to pick up rubbish and litter, clean the streets with their tongues, or trim the grasses and lawns of public parks and green spaces with their teeth, all while enduring the public jeering, taunting, and mockery of Youth Brigade members and public onlookers, and with some Dysfonctionnel victims even suffering acts of sexual assault in the process. Throughout the mass pogroms and violence of La Semaine de la Grande Revanche, over 9,000 Dysfonctionnel persons were estimated to have been killed by PICOS uniformed officers or Purification Order paramilitaries, with tens of thousands more being forcibly disappeared and abducted for torture, brutal and abusive 'enhanced interrogations', or detention and forced labour in PICOS-run concentration camps. Although the Magnificus Dominus and most members of the EDP Government remained silent and made no comments endorsing the rampant violence, the High Inquisitor Geneviève said in a televised interview with L'Agence Nationale on 23 February 1991 that the sight of Dysfonctionnel homes on fire across Ravaliér, Provence, and Poisson was 'incredibly satisfying to watch and beautiful to behold' and called for 'that brilliant luminescence to grow brighter and ever more spectacular still, that these savages will tremble to behold the swift wrath and brutal vengeance of the Purgation people in defence of our right to exist in our own country, to thrive, flourish, and survive as who and what we are'. The next day, on 24 February 1991, the Purification Order's Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet would make a televised comment on the Purgatio 18 news channel laughing at the media's footage of his paramilitary soldiers running wild on the streets of Ravaliér and openly calling for the 'streets to run red with blood 'till they are drenched in oceans of the stuff, let these disgusting cockroaches squirm and suffer and taste the vengeance of our people, these filthy parasites surely know they deserve no less for their savage brutalisation of little Xavier de la Falaise, I hope every last one of them dies in pain, agony, and anguish, as do all good men and women in this country who love their people as themselves'.

When the violent pogroms abated, however, the aftermath of the brutalities of La Semaine de la Grande Revanche began to reveal deep divides and divisions within the PNL Government, when the EDP re-convened for an official meeting on 4 March 1991. High Inquisitor Geneviève and Commandant en Chef Delrico expressed support for the recent violence, as expected. In addition to that pair, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan made a remark that she found the wanton violence 'extremely understandable given the fury and outrage of so many in this country in response to recent high-profile security lapses and our failure to prevent the GEM terrorist attack in Savoy-Ducasse in particular', and added that she 'hoped that the attacks may have taught the hoodlums and vandals in this nation a very important lesson indeed, one can only hope that it is one that they won't be forgetting anytime soon', while PIGC Director Marin remarked that he found the violence 'fully justified as a response to the brutalities of the Dysfonctionnel upon the innocent and talented young Xavier', and added that he hoped it would 'bring some measure of peace and closure to the De La Falaise family and to Xavier's parents'. Justice Secretary Devona Moreau likewise expressed that she found the pogroms to be 'just desserts for the attack on the PIGC and on poor Xavier in particular' and that she harboured little sympathy for the persons attacked in the recent violence, regarding the ordinary Dysfonctionnel as 'fair game in light of all they have done to ruin and destroy this country'.

However, several sitting members of the EDP also openly began to express their view that they found the scale of the gruesome violence and brutality in the recent pogroms to be disproportionate and unnecessary. Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette expressed that she found the mass violence, killings, and open torture in the streets to be 'quite ghastly and distasteful' and feared that it would alienate many ordinary Purgations who 'initially supported the valiant efforts of this government to get a handle on the pressing problem of the out-of-control gang crime that had previously been permitted to run rampant on our streets', but who may now find the recent pogroms to be 'rather unpleasant and, perhaps, just a step too far and a tad bit extreme in its approach'. Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday similarly concurred that the extent of the violence in the recent pogroms had been unnecessary and feared that it could alienate more moderate members of the public and drive away international businesses and foreign investors, while Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval expressed fears that more acts of mass violence out in the open in broad daylight would stifle productive business activities from being conducted in peace and damage Purgatio's economic recovery from the Great Recession with consequential negative effects on the government's revenues and balance-sheets as well as public support for the regime. Both the PAF Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger and the Police Commissioner Audric du Bellay expressed sentiments to the effect that the mass violence had been 'quite unruly, unrestrained, and terribly disorderly', and might cultivate an environment of 'lawlessness, chaos, and anarchy on our streets', suggesting that the PICOS and Purification Order forces may need to be restrained under the more disciplined and regimental armed forces and conventional law enforcement agencies.

A heated debate broke out between the hardliners and moderates on the EDP Government, which lasted well into the evening of 4 March until the morning of 5 March. The views expressed on the EDP encompassed a wide spectrum, with High Inquisitor Geneviève and Commandant en Chef Delrico demanding an Executive Order (EO) which would give a clear 'green light' for further pogroms to take place and claiming that the recent bout of lynchings and beatings had had the desired effect of striking 'a most lively and deterrent terror into the hearts of all our enemies', while on the other end of the spectrum, Foreign Secretary Alain and Treasury Secretary Charlotte wanted an Executive Order (EO) which would impose clear restraints on the ability of PICOS and the Purification Order to engage in further acts of arbitrary violence against random Dysfonctionnel persons who were not linked to the ongoing insurgency and terrorism of the GEM more specifically. The arguments between the two factions became extremely acrimonious, with the EDP's minutes indicating that the High Inquisitor Geneviève had remarked at one point that she found the 'miserable whinging on the other side about 'violence, violence, violence' to be increasingly grating and insufferable' and with the Commandant en Chef Delrico shouting in frustration at Foreign Secretary Alain that he and his allies were 'nothing but a sorry-ass bunch of lily-livered pusillanimous little cowards'.

Finally, on the afternoon of 5 March 1991, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette, who found himself caught in the middle of the sniping and arguing of two increasingly hot-headed factions of the EDP Government, intervened to broker an unwieldly 'political compromise' between the two sides, in promulgating Executive Order (EO) No. 46 of 1991. EO 46/1991 imposed clear textual limitations on the ability of PICOS officers and Purification Order paramilitaries to attack, arrest, or otherwise harass random persons merely on account of their Dysfonctionnel genetic status, unless there was a "reason to believe" that they were involved in GEM insurgent activities or, in the alternative, if they were "operating in a supportive or auxiliary capacity in conjunction with an authorised enforcement operation of either the Purgation Armed Forces or the Purgation Police Force, or of both". It was the first time the PNL Government had ever enacted legislation which imposed an explicit protection for the Dysfonctionnel community, albeit that restriction was only imposed on PICOS and the Purification Order, and not on the PAF and PPF which, to the contrary, appeared to have been expressly exempted from that same requirement. However, as a trade-off and to ensure that that limitation did not inflame or incense either High Inquisitor Geneviève or Commandant en Chef Delrico, or their allies on the EDP, EO 46/1991 did provide the hardliners a corresponding 'carrot' by way of appeasement - all persons of Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel classification would be stripped of their Purgation citizenship and would from thenceforth hold the status of 'subjects of the Royaume' instead of 'citizens' thereof. They would thereby lose all the rights of Purgation citizenship, some of which had already been removed from the Dysfonctionnel community by that point in time, such as the right to hold any public or governmental office, join professional associations, enjoy various public services such as public education or government healthcare, or apply for welfare and social assistance, but others of which would be deprived from them by virtue of their loss of citizenship in EO 46/1991, such as all remaining rights of civic and political participation, all legal standing before the courts and the enjoyment of various procedural protections and other prevailing due processes under the justice system, all rights of petition to public bodies or governmental ombudsman, rights of residence and abode and internal movement within the country, rights to own various types of property, start certain kinds of businesses, or form specific categories of contracts of their own choosing, rights to marry and start a family without obtaining prior authorisation in a marriage or family visa from the Home Office, and rights to join or form social or cultural associations. In other words, the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel would from thenceforth be mere 'subjects' who remained under the governance and jurisdiction of the Purgation government, but without any corresponding civil or political rights or ordinary incidents of Purgation citizenship. As such, EO 46/1991 has often been abbreviated as the "1991 Political Compromise" for short.

The enactment of the 1991 Political Compromise led to a brief period of normalisation and the subsiding of the mass violence, lynching, and pogroms against the Dysfonctionnel by PICOS officers or Purification Order paramilitaries. However, while the Dysfonctionnel community would be relatively safer from random arbitrary violence in public spaces than before, they were not safe from the spectre of more officious and institutional forms of legalistic discrimination against them. In the wake of the successful GEM terrorist attack on a target as sensitive and heavily guarded as the PIGC laboratory in Savoy-Ducasse, the Home Office was eager to implement new security measures designed to prevent a similar such attack from occurring again. As such, the Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, acting under the subsisting empowering clauses of the PNC's Enabling of Anti-Dysfonctionnel Exclusion Act, enacted Home Office Order No. 204 of 1991 on 30 March 1991, which established a new security project in which the Home Office would provide funding and support to erect new turnstiles and secured gates to guard the entrances and exits of 'high-security' and 'sensitive' establishments across the country, such as government buildings, military bases and barracks, PIGC laboratories, and the like. A would-be entrant would have to tap their national photo ID card's barcode against the gate's card-reader and would be barred from entry if the card-reader detected them as Dysfonctionnel rather than Sain. Moreover, surveillance cameras would be installed in heavily-populated or trafficked metropolitan areas of the country, supplemented by mobile surveillance policing drones, especially in Ravaliér, Poisson, Provence, Savoy-Ducasse, and Pétrus, with facial recognition technology, cross-referenced against the existing Home Office data in the national photo identification card system and the PIGC's data in the national DNA database, which would detect Dysfonctionnel persons amongst large crowds to place such persons under more intense and heavy scrutiny, with any 'suspicious movements' such as persistent loitering around sensitive locations or seemingly circuitous and/or directionless roaming around secured areas being automatically 'flagged' by the system's program to the attention of the Home Office to conduct further investigations. That surveillance network, nicknamed Nos Yeux dans les Airs by the Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, was to be rolled out first in the most densely-populated parts of the capital of Ravaliér on 17 May 1991, with the surveillance programme to be incrementally expanded to other parts of the city of Ravaliér, followed by other densely-populated cities in the country. Given the expense and the scale of the logistics involved, it would take many more months and years for the Nos Yeux dans les Airs surveillance apparatus to expand outside of Ravaliér to other parts of the country, in a gradual, incremental, and piecemeal fashion.

Following the roll-out of Nos Yeux dans les Airs in April-May 1991, however, the political climate in Purgatio vis-à-vis the Dysfonctionnel would normalise somewhat for the remainder of the year 1991, without upticks in arbitrary violence, forcible disappearances, or sweeping new programs of state harassment or discrimination against them. However, it would sharply escalate again in the following year, in large part due to the brutal and draining ongoing civil war between the regular PAF military and the guerrilla insurgency of the GEM in the outlying and more isolated and far-flung neighbourhoods within the provinces of Villehardouin and Lusignan, with the GEM's covert underground operations becoming increasingly difficult for the PAF to stomp out and eliminate as the war dragged on. More than a year later by the opening of 1992, with over 160,000 civilian lives lost in the ensuing conflict, and tens of millions of Élites already expended to fund the PAF's costly military endeavours in the outlying provinces, the GEM militants had been driven underground and in hiding, but had certainly not been crushed and eliminated. While the major metropolitan areas in Limogens and La Roche were firmly under the control and occupation of the PAF, the less heavily-populated areas of the country had become hotbeds of resistance activities and the GEM continued to inflict a steady stream of small-scale 'hit and run' operations against PAF barracks and guerrilla 'harassment and interdiction' attacks upon PAF supply lines and materiel convoys, exhausting and wearing-down the PAF and its hold on the distant and outlying parts of those provinces.

With the Purgation civil war slowing into a costly stalemate of attrition warfare between PAF soldiers and GEM insurgents, the EDP Government grew increasingly anxious for a quick solution to break the stalemate. It was under those circumstances that the hardliners on the EDP - and High Inquisitor Geneviève and Commandant en Chef Delrico in particular - would propose a solution during the EDP Cabinet meeting of 13 January 1992. In their view, the underlying cause of the inefficiency of the PAF's 'search and destroy' operations and their attempts to root out specific GEM operatives in their painstaking and exhausting sweeps of individual cities and municipalities was its continuing adherence to a most tenuous and unworkable distinction between GEM militants and non-GEM members of the wider civilian populace. There being no reliable indicator of whether a particular ostensible civilian in a far-flung neighbourhood or rural locality in Lusignan or Villehardouin was truly just a peaceful civilian or a dangerous armed-and-trained GEM insurgent, the only way forward, they reasoned, was that the PAF had to finally do away with this distinction altogether and simply treat all members of the Dysfonctionnel community and their immediate family members as if they were, in fact, members of the GEM, and by extension, 'enemy combatants' to be either killed or detained at once.

Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger conceded at the meeting that he could not conceive of a more efficient method of putting down the GEM insurgency still raging on in the outlying provinces of Lusignan and Villehardouin more than a year later. With that, the Magnificus Dominus would formally enact Executive Order (EO) No. 67 of 1992 on 13 January 1992, also known as the "Dysfonctionnel Search and Detention Decree" by many commentators and academics. That Decree, EO 67/1992, would authorise PICOS secret police forces and the local provincial Purification Order paramilitaries to scour the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan, city-by-city, locality-by-locality, municipality-by-municipality, going door-to-door in neighbourhoods and stopping and searching random passers-by in any public spaces to demand their photo identification papers. If anyone was found to be classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, or discovered to have still remained unregistered with the Auspex Operandi system to date, PICOS officers and Purification Order paramilitaries were permitted to seize them and all their immediate family members to be detained in concentration camps to be erected across the face of the two provinces. PAF soldiers were also permitted to treat any and all Dysfonctionnel persons as 'enemy combatants' by default, to be fired upon as legitimate military targets or detained pre-emptively as prisoners of war. With the enactment of the Dysfonctionnel Search and Detention Decree, PICOS and the Purification Order began to develop a plan to systematically scour and search every neighbourhood and local community in both Districts to identify and round-up as many Dysfonctionnel as they could find and get their hands on. These mass indiscriminate searches and round-ups began in earnest on 19 January 1992, and by the end of March 1992, the sprawling concentration camps across the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan were estimated to have over 600,000 detainees in those facilities, dutifully guarded by PICOS officers whilst PAF soldiers continued fighting their slow grinding war against the ongoing GEM insurgency. And in an attempt to lighten the economic and materiel burdens of the PAF's ongoing military efforts against the GEM insurgents, PICOS would arrange for the over 600,000 detainees to be used as forced labour to produce war armaments and other war-related resources in newly erected factories, compelled to work through a mixture of torture, threats, intimidation, and a climate of terror cultivated by the PICOS officers. Working conditions were terrible, the hastily constructed war plants and factories had extremely poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, and the prisoners were served substandard and insufficient rations whilst being subjected to the frequent threat of beatings if harsh and exacting production quotas were not satisfied, keeping the overall operating costs of the camps relatively low compared to the production output.

As the war raged on, and it became apparent to the Purgation Security Service (PSS) and the Home Office that persons from all over the country were travelling to the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan to volunteer themselves for the GEM's insurgent efforts, especially Dysfonctionnel persons who were understandably sympathetic to their cause, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan would soon propose in the EDP meeting dated 25 November 1992 that the model of the indiscriminate preventative detention of the Dysfonctionnel and their use as forced labour to boost industrial production as needed to fuel the ongoing war effort should be expanded to the rest of the country, as she argued that the rationale of pre-emptive detention which had animated the prior Dysfonctionnel Search and Detention Decree clearly had just as much application, in her view, to the Dysfonctionnel scattered across the other five Districts of Purgatio (Burgundy, Montoire, Amboise, Le Tellier, and Montfauçon). Many others in the EDP agreed, and in order to ensure the round-ups of the Dysfonctionnel would be as effective and efficient as possible, Home Secretary Joslyn proposed that the Home Office be given a few months to compile the data gathered by its Nos Yeux dans les Airs surveillance network, which had been rolled-out in most major metropolitan areas of Purgatio by that point, to analyse and parse through that data to identify the places of work and residence of most if not all of the Dysfonctionnel who were living in the most populated areas of the country. That way, she reasoned, when that data had been compiled, it would be much easier for PICOS officers and Purification Order paramilitaries to find and arrest the Dysfonctionnel in a more precise and targeted fashion, without having to scour the entirety of the inner cities in a more aimless and dragnet fashion.

The EDP Ministers agreed with her proposal, and with that, Executive Order (EO) No. 1189 of 1992, often referred to as the "Dysfonctionnel Mass Surveillance and Detention Decree" by commentators and academics, came to be signed and enacted by the Magnificus Dominus on 25 November 1992. The Home Office would begin compiling the necessary data from its surveillance network starting from 30 November 1992 and came to accomplish its task by 12 March 1993. In the interim period, PICOS began building and erecting massive numbers of concentration camps all across the outlying areas of the other five provinces in anticipation of the ensuing mass arrests. On 14 March 1993, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan would issue a communiqué to her counterparts, the High Inquisitor Geneviève de la Fayette and the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet, relaying that the Home Office had completed its assignment and was ready to begin sharing their data and coordinating their efforts with PICOS and the Purification Order. On 19 March 1993, the mass round-ups of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel across the other five Districts of the country would begin in earnest, and by the close of May 1993, the number of detainees imprisoned and subjected to forced labour in the country's over 14,000 concentration camps would soon come to number well over 120 million prisoners in total.

As the number of detainees in the camps began to climb and escalate in the ensuing months, from a combination of more round-ups and door-to-door searches conducted by PICOS officers and Purification Order paramilitary soldiers systematically trawling and scouring through evermore neighbourhoods and local communities across the country, as well as from the detention of newly captured GEM militants in the continuing course of the ongoing civil war against the GEM insurgency in the provinces of Lusignan and Villehardouin, High Inquisitor Geneviève de la Fayette suggested at the EDP meeting on 2 December 1992 that the existing concentration camps had sufficient numbers of forced labourers fuelling the war effort, and in the interest of definitively putting to rest the ongoing civil war against the GEM in the outlying provinces, she proposed that PICOS officers operating in Lusignan and Villehardouin be given a change in their mandate - instead of being ordered to find and detain the Dysfonctionnel in those districts, they should instead be ordered to detect and then shoot them on discovery. High Inquisitor Geneviève reasoned that, given that those two Districts were still engulfed in the disorder and instability of an ongoing civil war which had been raging on continuously for roughly two years now, to have to identify the Dysfonctionnel, restrain them, corral and gather them up in concentrated groups before having to transport and shuttle them all in cramped vans hundreds of miles away to already packed and overcrowded facilities in the outlying edges of those provinces, constituted a most unwieldy and needlessly burdensome and inconvenient endeavour for her PICOS officers to have to perform. In her view, the much easier and simpler way to deny the GEM potential recruits and future fighters to maintain their ongoing war against the government would be to simply execute and eliminate any further Dysfonctionnel that her PICOS officers manage to discover in the course of their door-to-door searches.

Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet agreed, expressing in that same EDP meeting of 2 December 1992 that the government had 'molly-coddled the Dysfonctionnel for far too long, to my mind' and the time had long since come to 'finally be rid of this whole goddamn mess and for good'. Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan would express a similar sentiment, she opined during the EDP meeting of the next day on 3 December 1992 that the concentration camps already had their fill of detainees and slave labourers to satisfy the necessary production quotas for the military-industrial complex, and in any event, any further expressions of 'disordered' or 'antisocial' behaviours by the remainder of the Purgation populace, through the commission of future crimes by persons currently classified as Génétiquement Sain or the display of other 'disordered' traits such as vagrancy or indolence or 'work-shy' tendencies would result in their re-classification and detention in a concentration camp, hence she reasoned that the forced labour facilities would not be wanting of new batches of slave workers any time soon, and thus the more efficient way to put the ongoing insurgency against the GEM to bed was for PICOS operatives in Villehardouin and Lusignan to be transformed into a paramilitary death squad and to kill off any remaining Dysfonctionnel they could find and identify in those two Districts.

Some of the moderates on the EDP would express their reservations about the proposal. As the meeting dragged on to the next few days, the Premier of the PNC Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette suggested on 5 December 1992 that it had 'never been the plan' to eliminate or kill off the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel in their entirety, simply to identify them for proper handling and attention by the authorities, and she found herself 'discomfited' by the notion of their complete and total eradication across the nation. The Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval agreed and expressed her fears that the proposal by the High Inquisitor was a 'slippery slope' towards the wholesale eradication of the Dysfonctionnel as a whole, and wondered if the genocide of such a significant and substantial minority of the country's population would have damaging effects upon the national economy that the country could not or should not have to bear. Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday expressed his own anxieties the next day on 6 December 1992 that while the nation's international reputation had certainly taken a significant hit on the world stage as a result of its recent atrocities, genetically discriminatory and segregationist policies, and the commission of various crimes against humanity, he nevertheless suggested that 'emergency wartime measures in the midst of an urgent crisis and especially in the middle of a warzone' and 'civilian control measures amounting in essence to differential treatment based on differing characteristics' could still be rationalised and explained away, whereas he feared that an 'outright genocidal eradication' would represent a 'point of no return' that was bound to irreparably damage the nation's global image and would correspondingly spook international corporations and foreign investors.

As the EDP continued to debate the matter heatedly for the next few days, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would put an end to his Ministers' arguments by promulgating Executive Order (EO) No. 1744 of 1992 on 9 December 1992. EO 1744/1992 would empower the High Inquisitor to convert her PICOS officers stationed in the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan into paramilitary execution squads, authorised to extra-judicially shoot and kill any further Dysfonctionnel discovered in those Districts, whilst reassuring the moderates on the EDP that that was only a wartime emergency measure designed to quell and quieten the ongoing GEM insurgency in those Districts, and that he had no intentions of extending the extra-judicial killings of the Dysfonctionnel to the other five peacetime Districts of the country. He also orally remarked in that same meeting that it remained his intention to withdraw and rescind EO 1744/1992 once the civil war was over and the GEM insurgency had been crushed for good. After the civil war was done with, the Magnificus Dominus suggested, a broader and more sober discussion could be had on the EDP as to what the post-war treatment of the Dysfonctionnel in peacetime would be, unconstrained by the pressures and exigencies of war, whether they would remain in their concentration camps, or be slowly re-integrated into broader Purgation society but under certain controlled, regulated, or closely supervised conditions, or something else. Hence, EO 1744/1992 is often referred to by historians and commentators as the "Wartime Death Squads Decree" for convenience. Now newly empowered by that Decree, High Inquisitor Geneviève immediately promulgated PICOS Order No. 778 of 1992 on that same day of 9 December 1992, converting the PICOS officers stationed in the outlying Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan into a paramilitary death squad empowered to perform extra-judicial killings and executions, whilst still retaining the existing status of her PICOS forces who were attached to the other five Districts of the nation as a 'search and detain' task force only, as opposed to being an execution squad. High Inquisitor Geneviève would write in an internal departmental memorandum on 12 December 1992 that she was 'incredibly pleased' with the recent enactment of the Wartime Death Squads Decree, opining that it set a 'most positive precedent indeed', which she hoped would 'soon come to be adopted by the rest of my PICOS officers as well, in due time'. Over the next few months, the High Inquisitor's PICOS forces in those two wartime Districts would proceed to root-out and then summarily shoot and execute more than 85,000 Dysfonctionnel civilians.

As the civil war with the GEM militants continued to rage on, by 11 March 1993, the Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger announced at an EDP meeting that his PAF forces had successfully established firm control over all major municipalities in the Districts of Lusignan and Villehardouin, and that in his assessment the GEM fighters had been driven away into hiding in the most isolated and desolated parts of the countryside. The members of the EDP were thrilled about the news, which prompted Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet to suggest that the time had come to seriously consider the option of exterminating all of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel in the Districts of Lusignan and Villehardouin altogether, now that it was anticipated that their forcible services would soon no longer be needed for the war effort. Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle was horrified by the suggestion and remarked that the impending end of the civil war meant that it was time to consider normalising and relaxing the government's treatment of the Dysfonctionnel, suggesting that they could now be released from their concentration camps in the other five peacetime Districts of the country, now that their pre-emptive detention was no longer needed as a wartime preventive measure to prevent them from joining arms with the GEM. High Inquisitor Geneviève de la Fayette balked at the suggestion and described it as 'complete and utter madness', and Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan agreed and warned that it would lead to a 'sharp uptick in urban crime and delinquency'. Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle attempted to assuage their concerns by suggesting that the Dysfonctionnel could be released into heavily monitored segregated ghettos in the country, far away from the more populated central areas of the inner cities to ensure that they were not in close proximity to the Génétiquement Sain. She even suggested that the Home Office's new extensive surveillance apparatus was sufficiently comprehensive so as to closely supervise these segregated ghettos and monitor the activities of the Dysfonctionnel to prevent any anticipated uptick in crime, terrorism, or insurgent activities.

Other moderates on the EDP such as Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday and Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval agreed and concurred with the proposal of the Premier of the PNC Jeanne-Emmanuelle. Treasury Secretary Charlotte reiterated her views on the next day's EDP meeting of 12 March 1993 that it was 'sheer lunacy' to contemplate the extermination of approximately 15% of the country's population, and that the eradication of such a significant proportion of the country's workforce would have a most damaging effect on the nation's economy and the government's annual tax revenues and fiscal balance-sheet. Foreign Secretary Alain agreed and suggested that the release of the Dysfonctionnel back into the ordinary civilian populace, albeit in segregated and heavily policed and monitored ghettos, could be sold to the international community as a sign of peacetime normalisation which could calm international markets and reassure foreign investors and international corporations that Purgatio was a safe and stable place for their business, whereas he surmised that a violent nationwide genocidal eradication of the Dysfonctionnel would send just the opposite dissuasive message to international capital. Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle even attempted to break the deadlock and appease the extremists and hardliners on the EDP with a compromise proposal that she floated the next day of 13 March 1993, which is that the Dysfonctionnel could be sterilised to control their numbers and prevent the perpetuation of their disordered and perverse genes into the rest of the Purgation gene-pool.

The High Inquisitor of PICOS was not satisfied with that idea, however, and when the EDP re-convened the next day on 14 March 1993, she would openly condemn the plan proposed by the Première Législatrice as a 'cowardly and foolish retreat', and suggested that 'if we have the parasites locked up and in the palm of our hands, we would all have to be crazy to let them go when we have ourselves a perfect, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put an end to this problem for good'. Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet concurred and suggested that the moderates voicing objections to the High Inquisitor's plan were 'nothing but a bunch of useless, feckless, spineless fools', going so far as to toss out the remark that 'all of this endless lachrymose whining and sympathising with these disordered cockroaches is bordering on treason, if you ask me', a remark which the Magnificus Dominus sternly pressured him to withdraw. Both Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan and PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille broadly agreed with those sentiments, although they expressed their views in more measured terms, suggesting that they could not countenance any release of the Dysfonctionnel from their labour camps back into wider society which would not cause an uptick in their antisocial and/or parasitical behaviours burdening the rest of Purgation society. They both suggested as a compromise measure keeping the Dysfonctionnel in the concentration camps on a long-term basis as slave labourers without releasing them back into Purgation society, an idea which was balked at and resisted by both the moderates and the hardliners.

Finally, after days of ferocious arguing between the two sides, on 16 March 1993, Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle proposed that if the EDP members were so deeply divided on the subject, then the topic ought to be sent for a broader and more comprehensive debate on the matter before the Purgation National Congress (PNC), to discuss the matter and ultimately come to a resolution thereon. The EDP would split along different lines on that issue, with High Inquisitor Geneviève and Foreign Secretary Alain both disagreeing with the idea of submitting the matter to the PNC, believing that the matter should not be discussed in an open legislative setting amongst hundreds of legislators and that it was a sensitive affair best left to be discussed by the Ministers holding portfolios on the EDP. Both Commandant en Chef Delrico and Treasury Secretary Charlotte disagreed, however, and wanted the matter to be debated by the parliamentarians in the PNC, believing that their side would ultimately prevail the more the matter was litigated openly and publicly before the media and, by extension, the broader Purgation populace. Eventually, the Magnificus Dominus agreed to adjourn the matter for the Premier of the PNC to propose a resolution on the matter and to await the outcome of the PNC's impending legislative debate.

The PNC would meet to discuss the matter on 3 April 1993, with the Première Législatrice proposing a legislative motion for the chamber to debate and discuss - namely, whether the PNC would support a proposal for the gradual and incremental release of all Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel from their concentration camps following the conclusion of the PAF's war against the GEM terrorists, subject to a series of controls and regulations, including their compulsory sterilisation, restrictions to segregated housing areas, coupled with the strict policing and robust surveillance of such ghettoised communities to protect public safety and prevent public order from being imperilled by their release, also known as PNC Legislative Motion (LM) No. 76 of 1993 or LM-76 for short.

At the time, the PNC was composed of 670 lawmakers in total. Prior to the PNL's takeover and coup d'état of 1987-1988, it had a total of 860 elected legislators, but with the arrest of 216 opposition lawmakers back on 27 August 1988 and subsequent internment in concentration camps, there were only 644 lawmakers left in that body, 522 from the PNL party and 122 from the PDP or LPP, amongst whom 109 accepted the offer of the Magnificus Dominus to take up PNL party membership, and with the remaining 13 lawmakers voluntarily resigning from the PNC legislative body. From 1988 to 1993, the Magnificus Dominus would order a Regional Commission to redraw the constituency boundaries to reduce the original 860 départements across the seven provincial Districts into just 670 départements, before appointing 39 PNL party activists, local canvassers, and grassroots campaigners to fill the remaining vacant seats, making up 670 lawmakers in total. When the PNC re-convened for its legislative session on 3 April 1993, all 670 legislators were in attendance for the much-anticipated debate on a highly controversial issue which had garnered much public attention in the course of the preceding weeks.

Although the 670 legislators were all official party members of the PNL, nevertheless just like the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) the PNC would be similarly divided on the issue of the proposed LM-76. On one end of the spectrum were the hardliner extremists, consisting of the 'far right', 'extreme reactionary', 'ultra-nationalist' wing of the PNL, helmed by Nicolas Charlet - uncle of the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet and leader of the failed Putsch Pétrussien - and his former deputy and lieutenant of his provincial volontaires auxiliaires, Louis Paradis, both of whom had been seamlessly integrated from their local volontaires auxiliaires into the Purification Order (like many others), and who now staunchly opposed LM-76 on the basis that, to their mind, the Dysfonctionnel were a dangerous threat and an inimical menace whose existence prejudiced the safety and well-being of the Purgation polity, and their continued mass detention in their concentration camps in the long-term was necessary to safeguard the strength and future development of the nation. On the other end of the spectrum were the moderates who made up the 'traditionalist conservative', 'centre-right', 'law and order' wing of the PNL, consisting mostly of former PDP and LPP politicians who had joined the PNL (following its coup), as well as the more moderate of the original PNL politicians, who advocated a return to 'political normalisation' and a less radical, more peaceful state of affairs in the country. This wing was led by former PDP Party Leader Jules Philibert du Cerceau, former LPP backbencher Sébastien de Chómon, and of course, the Première Législatrice herself, Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette.

The legislative debate lasted for about a month, and was extremely heated and acrimonious, with many vexatious and personal attacks and insults being bandied about by various lawmakers whilst the chamber was still in session, with Jules Philibert du Cerceau referring to the extremists as 'crazed, bloodthirsty lunatics' who wanted the country to be 'stuck in a perpetual state of chaos, anarchy, and lawlessness' on 7 April 1993, while Sébastien de Chómon made explicit reference to the infamous incident of La Semaine de la Grande Revanche which many of the hardliners had been alleged to have participated in, saying of Nicolas Charlet and Louis Paradis in particular that 'if these madmen had their way, this country would be plunged back into the abyss of war, destruction, endless killing and devastation, enough is enough, the Purgation people want a return to peace and normalcy' on 22 April 1993. The moderates portrayed the proposal in LM-76 as a healthy political compromise which would re-integrate the Dysfonctionnel back into wider circulation whilst taking appropriate pre-emptive measures to monitor and supervise them for the protection of general public safety, which in their view constituted a real, long-term plan for accommodating the Dysfonctionnel as opposed to keeping them cramped in concentration camps, having to be guarded, housed, and fed by the State, potentially indefinitely, with no clear plan or end-goal in sight.

In contrast, the extremist hardliners wanted the Dysfonctionnel to remain in the concentration camps, and suggested that the better long-term redress was simply to exterminate the Dysfonctionnel or let them slowly starve to death without provision of sustenance in the camps. Nicolas Charlet suggested on 12 April 1993 that the moderates, especially those who had formerly been PDP or LPP politicians, were simply 'ungrateful traitors' who had shown 'no gratitude or appreciation to our Royaume and her Magnificus Dominus for magnanimously permitting them to remain in his chamber and to prove their loyalty to our realm despite their former association with the very traitors and terrorists who conspired to undermine her perfidiously from within', and on 27 April 1993 his former lieutenant Louis Paradis escalated that accusation by outright stating that 'in my view, anyone who whines and hand-wrings over the fate of parasitical cockroaches must be deemed to be a parasite themselves, and the more we sit here uselessly debating this matter unable to do anything, the more I begin to wonder if they ought, perhaps, to share the same fate as them'.

Eventually, LM-76 was put to a vote before a packed legislative chamber on 30 April 1993, and it passed by a resounding majority of 408-262. The Premier of the PNC, Jeanne-Emmanuelle, expressed great relief at the outcome, openly stating after the vote was announced by the Speaker that she was 'immensely heartened by the result which I imagine comes as a great comfort to many of us here', and she expressed her hopes that LM-76 would provide a 'workable compromise and long-term solution for the re-integration of the Dysfonctionnel into our society in a peaceable and harmonious manner, and that there will be a return to normalcy and order once the brutal and ghastly civil war against the terrorists in Villehardouin and Lusignan has been won, once and for all'. The next day, on 1 May 1993, the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus would sign and ratify LM-76 whilst issuing an accompanying public statement which confirmed that the Magnificus Dominus had 'taken heed of the most carefully deliberated advice of his most loyal legislators on the PNC' and that he would 'accept and implement their counsel in due time'. A few days later, on 5 May 1993, the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus would draft and issue a directive to Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan and High Inquisitor of PICOS Geneviève de la Fayette, directing both of them to begin making plans for the sterilisation and gradual release of the Dysfonctionnel from their concentration camps into segregated and closely policed and monitored ghettos, to be implemented on a future date to be designated by the Magnificus Dominus once the civil war in the Villehardouin and Lusignan provinces was determined to be won and over.

In contrast, the hardliners were furious and outraged by the result, and the backlash from the extreme 'far right' wing of the PNL was swift and immediate. The High Inquisitor of PICOS, Geneviève de la Fayette, organised a rally of the more extreme of the PNL rank-and-file members, holding huge political rallies numbering tens of thousands of attendees in all major cities across the country from 9-17 May 1993, in which she expressed her outrage at the result, saying to an incensed crowd of party campaigners at a rally in Poisson on 13 May 1993 that the passage of the recent legislative motion was 'nothing less than a great betrayal by privileged elites sitting comfortably in a bubble-wrapped legislative chamber' who 'were not alive to the sentiments on the ground and the fears and anxieties of so many ordinary Purgations who are sick and tired of seeing their families destroyed and ravaged by drugs, crime, and hooliganism run amok', and at another PNL rally in Provence on 15 May 1993 she threatened that 'if those cowardly bastards in the PNC won't listen to what we have to say, then we're just gonna have to make them, now won't we'. The Purification Order's Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet was likewise incensed and livid about the passage of LM-76 by the PNC, and together with Nicolas Charlet and Louis Paradis who also held paramilitary leadership positions within the Purification Order, he organised huge marches through the streets of Purification Order soldiers performing stunning drills in synchronised lockstep in huge public squares in Ravaliér on 18 May 1993, before addressing his soldiers in which he threatened 'to rain down the fury of the people who are sick and tired of being stabbed in the back over and over again by cowardly fattened politicians who are blind and deaf to our anger', warning that a 'day of reckoning is approaching for parasites and parasite-lovers all across this nation who are dragging us down into the abyss - mark my words, people, we're gonna bring a fucking storm'.

Likewise, on 4 June 1993, both High Inquisitor Geneviève and Commandant en Chef Delrico would organise a new political movement bringing together all of the ideological extremists in the 'far right' wing of the PNL's rank-and-file party activists, PICOS officers and troopers, and Purification Order paramilitary soldiers, called Ça Suffit!, which held even more rallies and demonstrations across Ravaliér, Provence, Poisson, Provençal, Savoy-Ducasse, Lyons, and Pétrus attracting hundreds of thousands of attendees within their movement. As High Inquisitor Geneviève, Commandant en Chef Delrico, and Purification Order commanders Nicolas Charlet and Louis Paradis, gave angry impassioned speeches to the assembled crowd, calling for the immediate killing and extermination of all the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel in the concentration camps, the frenzied and enraged mob gathered before them would wave copies of Geneviève's La Solution Finale 'little blue book' in their shaking palms, waving huge peacock-blue flags above them (a reference to the colour of Geneviève's treatise when it was first published) with the huge capitalised words "ÉRADIQUONS TOUS LES CAFARDS!!" imprinted on the face of the fabric, while chanting, loudly and in unison, in a booming rhythmic anthem, "É-ra-di-quons! É-ra-di-quons! Tous-les-ca-fards! Tous-les-ca-fards! É-ra-di-quons! É-ra-di-quons! Tous-les-ca-fards! Tous-les-ca-fards!"

In fact, the breakdown in relations between the PNL extremists in the new Ça Suffit! movement and the moderates in the PNL Government and the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) had escalated and been inflamed to such an extent that, by the close of June 1993, foreign journalists and commentators had begun to speculate that Delrico Charlet and the Purification Order were even plotting to overthrow the current government in a coup d'état of his own and install a new régime of hardliners held together by the extremists in the PNL rank-and-file activists, PICOS officers, and Purification Order paramilitaries, and that the plotted coup never took place only because High Inquisitor Geneviève persuaded Commandant en Chef Delrico not to go ahead with the plan or otherwise indicated that she would not support it - either because of her family relationship to the Magnificus Dominus (who was her husband and with whom she had a young daughter) and to his sister, Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle, or out of her sheer pragmatic recognition that the coup would likely fail because the leaderships of the regular Purgation Armed Forces (PAF) and conventional Purgation Police Force (PPF) remained dominated by traditional conservatives who were likely to intervene to thwart their putsch and defend the government-of-the-day. However, such speculations could not be definitively confirmed either way and thus remain mere rumours.

In any event, that breakdown in relations between the two factions on the EDP Government would not last for much longer, and an unintended reconciliation would be effectuated by a turn of events which had been seemingly unanticipated by both sides. While the PAF had long believed that the civil war and ongoing insurgency in the outlying provinces had been quietened and stifled, and the GEM militants had been boxed-in and isolated to the far-flung corners of the nation by the PAF's brutal and systematic 'search and destroy' operations, in truth, the GEM had merely been driven underground, and were preparing to re-group and re-organise themselves to come out of the woodworks and renew their offensive against the PAF once more. That much was made clear when, on 7 July 1993, the GEM militants launched the opening salvo of what became known as the "Summer Offensive", a string of over 300 coordinated armed attacks on PAF barracks, convoys, and infantry regiments scattered all across the outlying frontiers of the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan lasting from 7-22 July 1993, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 5,879 PAF soldiers, the wounding of more than 17,000 other regulars, with around 900 more recorded as 'missing in action' or kidnapped and abducted by the GEM. The Summer Offensive pushed the PAF out of all the northwestern regions of the Districts, carving out huge swathes of territory under the de facto control of the GEM by the close of July 1993. Additionally, PICOS estimated that, as a result of the Summer Offensive, more than 40 concentration camps fell under the control of GEM fighters, liberating more than 300,000 Dysfonctionnel detainees in the process - including roughly 135,000 able-bodied men of fighting age, many of whom likely went on to fill the swelling ranks of the GEM. The GEM's advancements into PAF-held territory would only come to an end when PAF reinforcements began arriving in the Districts on 4-6 August 1993, resulting in a stalemate between the GEM and PAF and a return to a state of relatively inactive attrition warfare.

The Summer Offensive galvanised the 'far right' segments of the country and incensed and outraged the extremists and hardliners in the new Ça Suffit! movement. Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet and his Purification Order commanders Louis Paradis and Nicolas Charlet capitalised on the Summer Offensive to attack the PNC's recent passage of LM-76 as 'foolish', 'dangerous', 'a hideous betrayal of our soldiers on the frontlines', and 'nothing less than playing Russian roulette with Purgation lives'. At a Ça Suffit! rally in Ravaliér on 27 July 1993, Commandant en Chef Delrico even suggested that every PNC legislator who had voted for LM-76 should apologise to the Purgation people, and immediately pledge their support for the wholesale extermination of the Dysfonctionnel, and as soon as possible, 'before it's too late for us and our people to save ourselves from our ultimate destruction'.

On 8 August 1993, when the EDP re-convened for another official meeting, High Inquisitor of PICOS Geneviève de la Fayette would propose Executive Order (EO) No. 449 of 1993. EO 449/1993 proposed to authorise PICOS officers and their auxiliaries in the Purification Order to begin exterminating all able-bodied Dysfonctionnel men of fighting age in every PICOS concentration camp within the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan, and for all remaining detainees to be forcibly deported out of those two Districts to other PICOS concentration camps scattered across the remainder of the country. In the High Inquisitor's own words as recorded in the EDP minutes of that day, 'the sheer folly of the previous 'detain, then let's wait and see' approach has been made starkly clear by recent tragic events, now it is time for us all to grow a spine and finally win this war by doing what needs to be done to deprive the GEM of their fresh recruits before it is too late for all of us, so either you are on the side of the Purgation people or on the side of our impending defeat and ruination at the hands of the Dysfonctionnel terrorists - you decide'. Thus, EO 449/1993 is often abbreviated by historians and academics as the "Provincial Dysfonctionnel Genocide Decree" for short.

by **Purgatio** » Fri Aug 18, 2023 11:55 pm

The moving of the Provincial Dysfonctionnel Genocide Decree on 8 August 1993 had been preceded by a sharp uptick in media propagandist demonisation and fear-mongering about the Dysfonctionnel by the Purgation right-wing press, and of the Dysfonctionnel fighters and militants in the GEM in particular, which extremist 'far right' movements like Ça Suffit! depicted as one and the same in any event. Right-wing tabloids like La Voix du Royaume, Le Courrier Purgatien, and Nous Sommes Tannés! ran stories about the Summer Offensive which either fabricated or exaggerated the atrocities or war crimes committed by GEM fighters - lurid stories of women and girls being raped and beheaded in the streets as GEM fighters took over a city, tales of GEM soldiers inflicting gruesome torture upon young captured PAF soldiers, butchering and mutilating them, cutting off their hands and legs, playing football with their decapitated heads, feasting on their flesh and tearing into their chopped-off thighs with their teeth, claims that civilians had their eyes gouged out and tongues slashed before being left to die and waste away in the messy dirty streets of a ruined city overtaken and overrun by GEM militants run amok, vivid stories of buckets of sulphuric acid being tossed on helpless civilians in the streets as their victims vigorously writhed and squirmed away in agony, of homes being set on fire with families trapped inside, of soldiers and civilians alike being doused with kerosene before being lit on fire to form huge bonfires in the occupied cities while drunk GEM fighters and their fresh new 130,000 or so Dysfonctionnel recruits into their militia would party and dance around the bonfire of burning carcasses to celebrate their recent 'liberation' from the camps.

High Inquisitor Geneviève was very explicit about the implications she wanted Purgations to grasp from these accounts of the Summer Offensive when she appeared on Purgatio 18 for a televised interview on 3 August 1993, in which she solemnly remarked that 'you know, my biggest, deepest, darkest fear, the thing that really keeps me up at night, is that if we just keep on doing nothing, if this government just sits idly by, uselessly, fecklessly, complacently, then all these Dysfonctionnel terrorists, communists, insurgents, they will drag this whole nation down into the abyss, and us along with it, unless we act and we do something about it'. Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet would hold another stunning military parade in a huge public square in Ravaliér on 5 August 1993, in which he echoed a similar sentiment, shouting to the assembled crowd of soldiers and onlookers that 'these Dysfonctionnel parasites in Lusignan and Villehardouin have revealed their true colours to us all, ravaging, pillaging, brutalising our people, killing and maiming and destroying anything and anyone wheresoever they go, as they rally more Dysfonctionnel parasites to their cause with every new prison they find, getting ready to unleash their hell and savagery upon the rest of the country once Lusignan and Villehardouin are firmly under their thumb - and yet this government would still force these cockroaches down our collective throats, back into our neighbourhoods, back into our communities, well not on our watch, and not in our name, we have had enough of the idling, the pussy-footing, and the inaction, eradicate these fucking cockroaches and eradicate them all now!!'.

The Ça Suffit! movement reached its peak popularity in the wake of the Summer Offensive coupled with the fear-mongering rhetoric in the media in the immediate aftermath which repeatedly stressed and emphasised the prospect of the GEM militants gathering up all of the various Dysfonctionnel presently interned in concentration camps, recruiting them into their army, and sweeping across the nation to rape, ravage, and pillage the rest of Purgatio just as they were allegedly already doing to the areas under their control in the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan. On the day that the High Inquisitor Geneviève would propose the Provincial Dysfonctionnel Genocide Decree, on 8 August 1993, over 250,000 demonstrators from the Ça Suffit! movement had already gathered in droves on the streets of Ravaliér, surrounding the building of the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) and spreading out like tendrils across the city for miles and miles with the EDP building as the nexus of the demonstration, helmed by Nicolas Charlet and Louis Paradis who would lead the crowd on the steps of the EDP building in their familiar rhythmic chant of "Éradiquons tous les Cafards! Éradiquons tous les Cafards!", over and over again, their thunderous voices echoing like a booming crescendo even from the building's interior.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the prevailing political climate, numerous members of the EDP would speak out in support of the Provincial Dysfonctionnel Genocide Decree. Familiar hardliners like Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet, Justice Secretary Devona Moreau, and PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille all spoke up in favour of High Inquisitor Geneviève's proposed EO 449/1993. However, even the PPF Commissioner Audric du Bellay would speak in support of the proposal, remarking that the EDP had 'underestimated the continuing strength of the GEM insurgency' and suggesting that if all the Dysfonctionnel were liberated by the GEM throughout Villehardouin and Lusignan, they would be 'completely beyond our capacity to control or manage'. Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger would make a similar remark admitting that the PAF had 'failed to appreciate the persistence and incorrigibility of our enemies' and conceded that he could 'think of no other way to guarantee that the GEM would be denied a string of new recruits and prospective foot-soldiers to draft in their ongoing war against our people and our Royaume'. The EDP meeting would reach its climax, however, when the Premier of the PNC, Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette, would issue a formal apology for 'having gotten it so wrong' and 'not realising the danger we were all in until now', even going so far as to extend a personal apology to her sister-in-law, the High Inquisitor Geneviève, which the High Inquisitor duly acknowledged and accepted on record.

The EDP would continue discussing the proposal well into night, and given the views expressed by the EDP's members, it consequently came as no surprise to anyone when the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette decided to sign and promulgate EO 449/1993, or the Provincial Dysfonctionnel Genocide Decree, on 8 August 1993. When the ecstatic and excited High Inquisitor Geneviève and Commandant en Chef Delrico ran out of the EDP building to announce the news to the thronged crowd of Ça Suffit! demonstrators who were waiting for the news outside, the frenzied and incensed mob erupted in thunderous applause, cheering and hooting wildly as High Inquisitor Geneviève promised the crowd that she and her PICOS forces would 'bring a hailstorm of terrible retribution upon the Dysfonctionnel animals in Lusignan and Villehardouin for what they have inflicted upon our people, whatever it damn well takes'.

As PAF forces painstakingly pushed their way into GEM-held territory in the Districts of Lusignan and Villehardouin, PICOS and the Purification Order would work in concert to begin the systematic genocide and eradication of all Dysfonctionnel able-bodied men in PICOS-operated concentration camps between the ages of 16 and 58. From August to November of 1993, millions of Dysfonctionnel women and children and elderly prisoners would be forcibly transported in vans and trucks by Purification Order paramilitaries across vast distances to other PICOS concentration camps scattered across the rest of the country, after which PICOS officers would arrange for all the Dysfonctionnel male prisoners of fighting age still left in the labour camps to be exterminated en masse by barring all entrances and exits, insulating and sealing all air leakages, and then releasing lethal poison gases like carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide into the facilities, until all of the concentration camps in Lusignan and Villehardouin were emptied out and abandoned by the close of November 1993. In the ensuing months to come, as PAF forces slowly took back control of towns and cities that the GEM had taken over, one-by-one, PICOS paramilitary death squads, with the assistance of Purification Order soldiers, would systematically conduct round-ups of the local population and conduct identity checks on residents, and any persons found to be Dysfonctionnel or unregistered were summarily shot and executed by PICOS troopers along with all their immediate family members. All in all, over 11.1 million Dysfonctionnel were estimated to have been either gassed and exterminated in PICOS concentration camps or shot to death by the roving PICOS extermination squads, while more than 17.4 million other Dysfonctionnel prisoners were forcibly deported and transferred to PICOS concentration camps across the other five peacetime Districts of the country, and were forced to continue working as slave labourers to fuel the PAF's ongoing war effort.

By the end of December 1993 and the beginning of January 1994, the PAF would make significant gains and inroads into the northwestern territories previously held by the GEM, with the militants once again being pushed back to the northwestern-most frontiers of the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan, isolated, cut-off, and driven into hiding. Most of the major localities and towns in those Districts had been seized and returned to the control of the PAF, and the civil war began to slow to a standstill, with only occasional flare-ups of fighting between 'lone-wolf' GEM operatives and regular PAF infantry regiments stationed at the front-lines of the border between PAF military barracks and the GEM-held outlying areas of the northwestern countryside. As the fighting slowly began to die down, and the fierce battles of the Summer Offensive appeared to be well and truly in the past, the Executive Directorate of Purgatio (EDP) once again had to confront the familiarly divisive question respecting the future long-term treatment of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel under relative peacetime conditions in Purgatio.

At the EDP meeting on 16 February 1994, Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette would pre-emptively concede that, notwithstanding the earlier passage of LM-76 by the PNC which called for the prospective release of the Dysfonctionnel once the civil war against the GEM was over, the 'circumstances have changed drastically since', and the 'security threat posed by the GEM and their Dysfonctionnel support base has been shown to be significantly more dangerous and damaging to this country and to our people than many of us in the PNC who voted for that legislative motion had anticipated, myself included'. Nevertheless, she emphasised that she remained 'of the view that the wholesale broad-based extermination of millions of our subjects' was 'still a step too far and bound to alarm and alienate many in this country who have been hoping for an eventual political normalisation and return to a more balanced state of affairs in this nation'. She proposed, as an alternative, that the Dysfonctionnel could instead remain in their concentration camps, imprisoned and under guard, such that they will be prevented from perpetrating more terrorist attacks upon the Purgation people 'without having to countenance their wholesale indiscriminate slaughter'.

Commandant en Chef Delrico was outraged by the suggestion and openly denigrated her compromise proposal as 'air-headed, retarded, and brain-dead', calling the Premier of the PNC a 'blind naïve fool' who had 'learnt absolutely nothing from having been proven so wrong by the Dysfonctionnel Summer Offensive in the northwest'. High Inquisitor Geneviève spoke in kinder and more measured terms about her sister-in-law, remarking that 'keeping the Dysfonctionnel under lock and key forever is an unworkable solution' due to the risk of prison escapes, slave rebellions, or insurgents taking over swathes of the country and releasing the Dysfonctionnel detainees to join their army. In her view, the Dysfonctionnel were an 'existential threat to the safety and well-being of this nation, their recent brutalities against our armed men and women on the frontline have proved that clearly and beyond a shadow of any lingering doubt', and thus the 'only way forward, in the long-term, is to get rid of them all, while we still can, while they are under our control, so that we can all move forward towards a better and brighter future without parasitical tendencies weighing down our progress and stifling our potential as a nation'.

The EDP would proceed to furiously and vigorously debate that question respecting the long-term treatment of the Dysfonctionnel for over a week, with the Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday remarking on 17 February 1994 that he found the Premier's idea a 'good, workable proposal and a harmonious way forward', surmising that 'detaining them and keeping them productive is good enough to counteract whatever damage this community would otherwise inflict, but resorting to the mass murder of hundreds of millions strikes me as needlessly extreme and bound to frighten and alarm large swathes of our population as well as the international community as a whole'. Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval concurred, remarking that the extermination of the country's slave labour force was 'bound to have a catastrophic effect upon our national economy', and that it made 'far more sense, economically speaking, to keep these people employed in their present positions in these facilities', and that the long-term treatment of the Dysfonctionnel should be as a 'workforce in what would become large-scale labour camps in the long-run'.

The next day, on 18 February 1994, the Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger would opine that, as the civil war had dragged on in the northwest, the PAF had become dependent upon the war armaments and supplies created in the war factories and labour camps cramped with Dysfonctionnel forced labourers, and if those labourers were to be exterminated en masse, the rest of the ordinary civilian workforce would need to be 'massively reorganised' to accommodate the resulting fall in wartime industrial production. For that reason, he was proposing that the Dysfonctionnel should not be exterminated but ought to remain in these concentration camps, which would be converted into labour camps in the long-run. That same day, his military colleagues, Chief of the Air Force General Staff Satordi de Castellane and Chief of the Navy General Staff Louis-Augustín de Maupeou concurred with his views and opined that the Dysfonctionnel should not be killed off but should instead be utilised and exploited for the war production effort, in anticipation of future potential conflicts with either communist or GEM insurgents or Purgatio's neighbours.

With the hardliners on the EDP becoming increasingly isolated on the issue of the long-term extermination of the Dysfonctionnel community in the future, Commandant en Chef would finally lose his temper and lash out on 19 February 1994, slamming the table with his fist and rising up to his feet before pointing at and screaming in the faces of various moderates, including Foreign Secretary Alain and Treasury Secretary Charlotte, describing them as 'feckless, spoiled, over-indulged cowards' who have 'never served this country a day in your life', 'knew nothing about the dangers of war', 'could give a rat's ass about the lives of ordinary Purgations', and accused anyone who was 'squeamish' about the proposed extermination of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel of 'wanting to see the people of this country suffer and die under an endless cycle of gang wars, drug crime, and terrorist attacks ad nauseam just as we had to suffer back in the 80s and before'. As he continued throwing more insults and hurling more verbal abuse at other Ministers on the EDP, he eventually had to be reprimanded and ordered to leave the meeting room by the Magnificus Dominus, an order he reluctantly complied with. In his absence, various moderates would begin to express their frustrations with the Commandant en Chef, with the Foreign Secretary calling him a 'low-class thug and bully' and a 'hooligan lout', the Treasury Secretary referring to him as a 'violent gangster' and an 'uncivilised brute little better than the criminals and gang leaders he demonises on the regular', and Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle thanking her brother the Magnificus Dominus for 'finally putting an end to that boorish ruffian's unhinged little temper tantrum'.

High Inquisitor Geneviève, however, would harshly rebuke them for their remarks, saying of the Commandant en Chef that he had 'put his life on the line to defend this country time and time again in the volontaires auxiliaires and now in the Purification Order' and that they all owed their 'lives and safety to the blood, sweat, and tears of working men and women like him'. Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan would express a similar sentiment, suggesting that alienating the Commandant en Chef was 'unwise and foolish' and remarking that the PNL government 'needed to keep him on board in light of the vital, indispensable role the Purification Order's played in helping us keep control of the country and of the cantons of Villehardouin and Lusignan in particular'. PPF Commissioner Audric du Bellay would agree with the Home Secretary, remarking plainly that 'if we alienate him, we risk losing all control of the country and especially over the parts of this nation engulfed in insurgency and instability'. When asked by the Magnificus Dominus whether he supported the proposal for all of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel to be exterminated, the PPF Commissioner said only that he felt 'rather torn', suggesting that a 'gradual return to order, harmony, and normalcy in the social sphere is, of course, desirable in my eyes, but I also cannot help but sympathise with the honourable Commandant en Chef and his undoubtedly admirable and understandable desire to see a definitive end to criminality, vandalism, and hooliganism for good, problems which this country has had to struggle with for far too long'. And Justice Secretary Devona Moreau, who herself hailed from a working-class background just like Delrico Charlet, would be even more explicit in her defence of Commandant en Chef Delrico, suggesting that the moderates who had spoken harshly of him were simply 'classist elitists airing out their puerile aristocratic pretensions and middle-class sensitivities', describing him as a 'diamond-in-the-rough', and saying of his critics that they were 'ungrateful for his service' and simply 'harbouring inane and juvenile prejudices against his self-admittedly uncouth and inelegant manner of expressing himself'.

As the EDP meeting dragged on well into the night of 19 February 1994, the Magnificus Dominus would intervene to adjourn the session in the hopes that 'cooler heads may prevail in the morning after a night of rest'. His wife, the High Inquisitor Geneviève, responded positively to his adjournment, and added on record that she would speak with Commandant en Chef Delrico that night to try and smooth things over and encourage him to return to the EDP meeting the next morning with a 'calmer, more even-tempered disposition'.

The next morning of 20 February 1994 would come, and when the EDP re-convened for another day of debate and discussion, the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet would return to the meeting in a calmer state, extending a sincere apology for his outburst of the previous day, and extending a personal apology to Foreign Secretary Alain and Treasury Secretary Charlotte for his 'rudeness' and his 'boorish behaviour', which they accepted on record. He would then open the proceedings by attempting to 'explain' his 'admittedly strong views and emotions on this subject' in a 'hopefully more temperate fashion'. The Commandant en Chef would explain that, after well over a decade of the country being engulfed in the violence and disorder of organised crime and extortionate racketeering by Les Frérots, violent terrorism at the hands of The Brigade of Deir Yassin, the chaos and disorder of the political violence and insurgencies of the Communist Party of Purgatio and the Genetic Equality Movement after them, he was simply 'sick and tired of the seemingly interminable 'whack-a-mole' hamster-wheel of trying to get a hold of this damn country and keep our people safe', adding that 'like so many Purgations, I'm afraid of what the future holds, and if these recent events from the GEM's insurgency in the northwest have taught us anything, it's that we need to assume the worst and act accordingly'. High Inquisitor Geneviève applauded him for his views, remarking that the moderates still opposed to the extermination of the Dysfonctionnel were being 'naïve, presumptuous, and complacent', attacking them for the 'sheer foolhardy attitude of thinking that keeping these people around for an extensive period of time, for decades upon decades on end, will end in anything but disaster for us', and harshly criticising them for believing that 'you can keep the Dysfonctionnel fully suppressed and under control for eternity - have you morons learnt nothing from the Summer Offensive?'

Subsequently that day, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan and Justice Secretary Devona Moreau would both speak out and thank the Commandant en Chef for his views, and they would put on record that they were both preliminarily in favour of his position of exterminating the Dysfonctionnel in their camps as a long-term solution to the ongoing 'genetically disordered' problem. PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille would also agree with them, further remarking that 'with over a billion DNA samples in the database and so much genetic data to work with, the Auspex Operandi is now far more accurate and refined in its algorithmic calculations than it has ever been', and lambasting the moderates for 'the unvarnished stupidity of believing that the dangerous and transmissible parasitical and antisocial qualities of this community can be quarantined and contained in the long-run', adding that 'now that these people have been identified, they need to be put out swiftly and without hesitation like a farmer stamps out a pestilence before it consumes and devours his harvest or as a doctor who coldly and meticulously cuts out a cancer before it overtakes and overruns an otherwise healthy body'.

The next day of 21 February 1994, the EDP meeting would continue, and several more Cabinet members would express their opposition to the idea of the wholesale extermination of the Dysfonctionnel. The Attorney-General Lucien Vannier expressed 'concerns' that 'such an extraordinary measure, adopted not as a temporary wartime deviation under exigent circumstances, but as a new and most extreme 'normal' in our society, could provoke radicalisation and undermine long-term harmony and stability in this nation'. Defence Secretary Juste-Charles de Givenchy expressed similar sentiments that the 'eradication of hundreds of millions on a whim is bound to provoke distress and anxiety amongst many and sets a very dangerous precedent that could see this nation engulfed in endless waves of political violence for decades to come'. Commerce Secretary Kalle Delcroix agreed and added that he 'concurred wholeheartedly with the views of the honourable Première Législatrice that, after the war, we must have a period of calm and a return to political normalisation in this nation, and I fear that the wholesale mass extermination of not just thousands or millions, but hundreds of millions, may have just the opposite effect'. Media and Culture Secretary Marquisa de Taillefer agreed and expressed that she 'feared the slippery-slope to long-term radicalisation and mass extremism in this country'. Treasury Secretary Charlotte reiterated her worries about the slaughter 'causing incalculable damage to the economy and our workforce' and feared the 'mass disruption it would inflict upon our civilian workforce if they had to undergo a painful market readjustment to fill the supply gaps from the loss of over 15% of the available labour units in the marketplace', and Foreign Secretary Alain expressed similar views that 'this country badly needs a return to order, harmony, and normalcy, and the last thing this society in upheaval can possibly bear is such a radical and destructive act inevitably unnerving and terrifying businesses, global entrepreneurs, talented foreign expatriates, and international capital more generally'. These last two comments would prompt a scoff and snort from the High Inquisitor of PICOS, who would state on the record, as captured in the EDP minutes of that day, that she 'cannot and will not ever understand you guys' freakish fetishistic obsession with foreign investors and international finance'. She also orally confirmed to the Cabinet Secretary, Eugène-Léon de la Garde de Chambonas, who was charged with writing the EDP minutes in question, that she was more than happy for those remarks to remain in the minutes, when asked outright if she wanted that statement to be 'off the record'.

The heated and impassioned debates on the subject continued the next day, and on 22 February 1994, the Director-General of the Purgation Security Service (PSS), Xavierre d'Aubigné, attempted to break the deadlock on the Executive Directorate with a compromise proposal - she suggested that, as the hardliners desired, perhaps the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel gathered in their concentration camps could be ordered to be exterminated; however, the method of their extermination would not be something fast-paced or rapid such as the dispersal of lethal poison gas or summary execution by firing squad, but instead they would be exterminated slowly and gradually over the course of decades by being worked to death. The Director-General of the Purgation Intelligence Agency (PIA) agreed, and remarked that it was a 'most politically inspired proposal' and would constitute a 'workable compromise' between the hardliners and moderates on the EDP. Education Secretary Urbain Robillard said he found the idea 'intriguing' and described it as 'a most pragmatic accommodation under the circumstances'. He further remarked that there was historical precedent for the plan, observing that when the RTCV enslaved various segments of the colonised populations and exploited them en masse in plantations, mines, and quarries, the average life expectancy of a slave or indentured servant labouring under inféoder had been approximately 21-22 years following their enslavement, due to a combination of overwork, malnutrition, unhygienic unsanitary accommodations, and abusive and unsafe working conditions.

As the day went on, more and more portfolio-holders on the EDP on both sides began to express support for the idea. Military leaders such as the Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger remarked that cutting back on sustenance and other provisions would vastly reduce the operating costs of the labour camps and thereby increase the efficiency of war-related industrial production. Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval agreed and remarked that cutting the logistical and maintenance costs of the camps would reap significant fiscal savings for the public purse. Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan suggested that it would be a 'workable means of controlling criminality and dysfunctionality' in the country, and added that with the Home Office's increasing and expanding reach of its surveillance apparatus, Nos Yeux dans les Airs, being rolled-out in more localities and townships across the nation, there would be 'no shortage of new slave labourers to replace the ones who waste away as more criminals are caught and apprehended'. Police Commissioner Audric du Bellay remarked that 'death through forced labour and overwork' would be a 'magnificent deterrent against criminal and disorderly conduct on our streets'. Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday added that the slow and gradual pace of the extermination would provoke considerably less alarm and distress than a rapid, widespread gassing of hundreds of millions of people, and expressed his hope that the lowered labour costs would go some way towards assuaging foreign investors and international businesses and corporations to turn a blind eye to the genocide. PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille remarked that the plan was 'acceptable' to him because 'while I would rather that we cut out the cancer and internal rot of our body national in the quickest manner possible, extracting some productive value from otherwise parasitical burdensome wastrels and vagrants has an appealing productive efficiency to it which I cannot wholly deny', but added that he could only countenance the proposal if the Dysfonctionnel prisoners were all sterilised to control their numbers. Justice Secretary Devona Moreau agreed with the PIGC Director's views, suggesting that a combination of sterilisation and extermination through labour would be a 'most adequate and effective long-term redress to the 'genetically disordered' problem facing this nation'. Even the Première Législatrice Jeanne-Emmanuelle de la Fayette would remark that the proposal was 'a compromise I can get behind if it can serve to unite both sides of the aisle and promote cohesion and solidarity between our varied public bodies and State institutions'.

The only holdouts against the proposal by the end of the meeting would be High Inquisitor Geneviève and Commandant en Chef Delrico. The former would remark contemptuously that she was 'shocked and dismayed at the presumptuous complacency' of her Cabinet colleagues and that 'the idea that you can slowly kill off these people over the course of decades and not risk full-scale revolts and rebellions which may, in future, be beyond our capacity to control, is madness to me', concluding that 'if the Dysfonctionnel ever re-organise and cause us the kind of nationwide trouble, disorder, and insubordination beyond what we have had to contend with thus far - which, as far as I'm concerned, is inevitable - our descendants will rue the day that we did not seize the opportunity to exterminate these parasitical perversities when we had the chance, when they were right in the palms of our hands'. And the Commandant en Chef would add simply that 'I have never in my life had to suffer the sheer indignity of attempting to reason with such a delusive coterie as this', and described it as 'sheer folly and stupidity to attempt to shackle and rein in disordered beasts as these', finishing with the comment that 'no one in their right minds would try and turn parasitical cockroaches into productive members of the workforce, you eradicate and exterminate as fast as you can and you move on, simple as that'.

The pair would remain outnumbered when the EDP re-convened on the morning of 23 February 1994, and the other Ministers would confirm on the record that they had not changed their views from the day before, and remained committed to the 'workable compromise' of eliminating the Dysfonctionnel gradually and incrementally through 'forced labour'. Hardliners such as Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille, and Justice Secretary Devona Moreau would attempt to persuade and mollify the High Inquisitor and the Commandant en Chef by impressing upon the pair that the Dysfonctionnel would still, ultimately, be liquidated and annihilated in a more gradual fashion, and that their mandatory sterilisation would control their numbers and guarantee that, even if they escaped, they would not pollute and contaminate the bloodlines and lineages of ordinary, productive, 'genetically healthy' Purgations. Reluctantly, High Inquisitor Geneviève would concede that 'I know when I'm beat' and 'at least they'll die, one way or another'. Commandant en Chef Delrico maintained his objection to the compromise, but reluctantly added that he would cooperate with the outcome of the meeting and he would continue helping with the round-ups of the Dysfonctionnel and their transfer to the concentration camps, but added a stern warning that 'if these parasites don't actually end up dying off, there'll be hell to pay, one way or another', and ended off his comments with a simple statement that 'exterminate means exterminate - no ifs, ands, or buts'.

With that, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would finally close off that tiring, week-long meeting by promulgating Executive Order (EO) No. 103 of 1994 on 23 February 1994. EO 103/1994, often called the "Dysfonctionnel Nationwide Liquidation Decree" by foreign journalists and academics, would order the mandatory sterilisation of any persons found to be classified by the Auspex Operandi as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel as opposed to Génétiquement Sain and their immediate transfer to one of many PICOS-operated concentration camps - which would thereinafter be renamed to 'liquidation facilities' or 'les facilités de liquidation'. It was thereby ordered that all Dysfonctionnel were to be exterminated by means of 'liquidation through labour', in other words, a brutal regimen of forced labour that was intentionally designed to be oppressive and draining enough to ensure that the slave labourers would die off or waste away from a deliberate combination of overwork, abuse, malnutrition, malnourishment, unhygienic and unsanitary living conditions, and dangerous and unsafe working conditions. To appease the hardliners, and especially the fears expressed by High Inquisitor Geneviève de la Fayette and Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet that the Dysfonctionnel would not actually be exterminated and liquidated, but would be retained as a permanent, long-term slave labour force in everything but name, EO 103/1994 also erected a tripartite commission consisting of Home Office administrators appointed by Home Secretary Joslyn, PIGC scientists appointed by Director Marin, and PICOS officers appointed by High Inquisitor Geneviève, to design the forced labour regimen in question and tweak any of the finer details of that programme as necessary to achieve the desired intent, which was not long-term enslavement, but 'liquidation through labour'. The Dysfonctionnel Nationwide Liquidation Decree even included an 'object clause' designed to make it clear, expressly and explicitly, the legislative intent behind the enactment of EO 103/1994, which stated that the "object and purpose of this Order shall be the long-term orderly liquidation through labour of all persons of a Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel classification", to avoid any interpretative ambiguities, ex abundanti cautela, as to the regulatory mandate of that tripartite commission in the course of designing that 'forced labour' regimen to be implemented.

At the time that the Dysfonctionnel Nationwide Liquidation Decree was signed into law by the Magnificus Dominus, Home Office statistics estimated that the number of detainees in PICOS concentration camps numbered anywhere between 198.76 million to 222.14 million detainees, whereas PICOS statistics were less conservative and reached a slightly more ambitious estimate of between 219.75 million to 238.98 million prisoners of Dysfonctionnel classification. The task of sterilising all of those detainees would be a mammoth undertaking, and as the Ministry of Health and Human Services (MHHS) rallied a team of doctors and nurses to be scattered to camps across the nation to perform that task, it estimated that the project was only completed by the close of September 1994. As for the program of 'liquidation through labour', the Tripartite Dsyfonctionnel Liquidation Commission would hold its first meeting on 20 March 1994, and its famous Labour Liquidation Framework would only be completed and promulgated on 10 November 1994. Once it was implemented, PICOS officers began increasing production quotas and working hours, cutting back on the food, water, and other supplements provided to prisoners, increasing the employment of beatings and abuse against prisoners deemed to be 'slacking off' or failing to meet production quotas, and virtually eliminating all sanitation and safety standards in camps and first-aid or medical treatment for workers. Only two months later, by the end of 1994, more than 180,000 Dysfonctionnel forced labourers had already been estimated to have died from the new 'liquidation through labour' regime, and with many more to follow in the months and years to come.

By the time the month of February 1999 came around, the Tripartite Commission would release a 'review report' providing updates on the ongoing progress of the Labour Liquidation Framework, with a set of detailed recommendations about minute adjustments which could be made to the framework, as well as areas or standards which could be relaxed or tightened in different aspects. The Executive Directorate would meet again on 6 March 1999 to discuss that report. The mood of that EDP meeting was positive, excitable, and elated all around. The PAF military leadership updated the EDP that it had made great gains in the past five years in wearing down the GEM, counteracting GEM guerrilla attacks, and arresting and imprisoning ever more GEM fighters and militants. According to Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger, the GEM had lost its hold on most of the gains it had made in the Summer Offensive, and it was largely confined to operating within the most isolated outlying areas of the northwestern-most parts of Villehardouin (around the rural townships of Haute-Voise and Val-de-Lissée) and Lusignan (around the small rural municipalities of Quesoin, Isèrain, and Erlignon). Local Purification Order paramilitaries and PICOS troopers had made great progress in scouring the localities and municipalities previously occupied by the GEM and roaming PICOS paramilitary death squads had already executed over 4.5 million GEM fighters and other Dysfonctionnel persons in the past five years or so. The Tripartite Commission's report was equally celebratory in its tone, noting that as more and more door-to-door round-ups and random searches in public spaces have been performed by the regular Police in conjunction with PICOS and the Purification Order, the number of Dysfonctionnel detainees in the newly renamed 'liquidation facilities' now exceeded 250 million prisoners, with over 6.3 million persons having died from the ongoing 'liquidation through labour' programme from 1994-1999.

In addition to regular laborious industrial work in war plants and factories, the Tripartite Commission also recommended that an order be promulgated formally permitting that the detainees be used for forcible experimentation by the PIGC and its scientific partners, and for the involuntary testing of medical operations by doctors and scientists and the testing of new military equipment, weapons, poisons, tortuous information-extraction techniques, and other psychoactive, 'mind control', or mind-altering agents by the Purgation Armed Forces (PAF), Purgation Security Service (PSS), Purgation Intelligence Agency (PIA), PICOS, and all other military and law enforcement bodies. High Inquisitor Geneviève remarked that she found herself 'surprisingly satisfied' by the albeit gradual pace at which the Dysfonctionnel were being exterminated and 'liquidated through labour', and PIGC Director Marin said he was 'thrilled' at the prospect of the 'more diverse and multifarious ways in which the Dysfonctionnel may soon be put to use, for the good and benefit of the Royaume'.

On 7 March 1999, with the support of the rest of the Executive Directorate, the Magnificus Dominus would promulgate Executive Order (EO) No. 92 of 1999, with EO 92/1999 formally expanding the variety of ways in which the Dysfonctionnel forced labourers could be used and exploited, from unethical human experimentation to weapons testing to tortuous interrogations and information-extraction. At that meeting, Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle would also suggest that the PNL government should 'make an event' out of the country's 'increased detection and detention of ever more perverse and disordered elements of our society', so as to 'raise public morale' and 're-invigorate and energise' the nation and her people in the government's favour, a suggestion which her sister-in-law, the High Inquisitor Geneviève, would compliment as a 'most inspired proposal indeed'. With that, the Magnificus Dominus would also give oral directions that same day for the EDP to meet and re-convene in six months' time to report on the ongoing progress of the continuing extermination of the Dysfonctionnel via 'liquidation through labour' - a project which High Inquisitor Geneviève would begin referring to as La Solution Finale, an homage to her famous political treatise of the same name.

When the next EDP meeting of 5 September 1999 came around, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan would update the EDP Government that, according to Home Office statistics, it was estimated that the number of detainees and forced labourers in PICOS concentration camps stood at approximately 267.881 million Dysfonctionnel prisoners, undergoing 'liquidation through labour', with the number of 'liquidated' persons since November 1994 standing at an estimated 6.763 million Dysfonctionnel individuals. High Inquisitor Geneviève remarked that the occasion was 'indeed a joyous one' and that she saw merit in the 'proposal of the Première Législatrice for the jubilant occasion to be transformed into a celebration all our people and nation may partake in and be merry together as one united Royaume'. Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle concurred and added that it would 'lift the spirits greatly for the people to be able to hear a most jubilant announcement from us, marking a special and joyous occasion in the onward and upward trajectory of our nation and people that may serve to uplift their souls and inspire their senses'. The Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would remark that he regarded that to be a 'marvellous idea' and described it as a 'most enlivening and elevating occasion for our people', and so he signed and enacted Executive Order (EO) No. 288 of 1999, declaring that the 19th, 20th, and 21st days of September would from thenceforth be designated as a brand-new special 3-day national holiday - Les Journées de la Victoire - intended to allow the Purgation people to celebrate the glorious triumph of the Royaume over the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel that had hitherto been stifling her full potential and suppressing her vitality, productivity, and greatness from within.

On 18 September 1999, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would give an excitable and jubilant speech at the balcony of the Presidential Palace of the Magnificus Dominus (previously the Presidential Palace), to a thronged crowd of approximately 10,000 celebrating members of the public, gathered in the assembly area and filling up the courtyard to stretch outwards in miles-long queues like limbed tentacles spreading far and wide across the city of Ravaliér and with the Palace as their epicentre. He would boldly and excitedly declare the emergence of 'a new, clean, and beautiful Royaume' and trumpet and celebrate the 'people's astounding victory over the Dysfonctionnel, at long last, who have plagued the good people of Purgatio for far too long with their criminality, predation, and parasitism - but no longer'. He would announce the existence of a new 3-day national holiday, Les Journées de la Victoire, from 19-21 September of every year, to a roused and excited crowd that hooted and cheered loudly, as the Magnificus Dominus ecstatically declared that 'finally, we have peace in our Royaume', and 'finally, at long last, we are free to be ourselves, to be the great and glorious nation that our people were always meant to be'.

The choice of 18 September 1999 as the date of the government's announcement of the nation's supposed definitive 'victory' over the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, as well as the dates of 19-21 September for the new national holiday, were, in truth, largely arbitrary. While nearly 270 million Dysfonctionnel were indeed being subjected to a slow, painful process of 'liquidation through labour' by that point, it certainly did not amount to every single Dysfonctionnel resident in Purgatio, many of whom were still in hiding, had fled to the less-policed outskirts of the country, travelled frequently and furtively to avoid being caught up in random PICOS raids or the Purification Order's surprise checks and searches, or were already in the midst of actively battling the PAF as resistance fighters in the GEM, holed-up in hiding and firmly rooted somewhere within the northwestern frontiers of the nation. Nevertheless, the PNL Government would self-declare its 'victory' over the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel on that date, giving their supporters a key occasion to celebrate the administration's ostensible achievements and accomplishments in its ongoing struggle against Dysfonctionnel Purgations.

To top it all off, in the middle of Purgatio's first ever Les Journées de la Victoire celebrations, the High Inquisitor of PICOS, Geneviève de la Fayette, would sign into law a regulatory order of her own, PICOS Order No. 344 of 1999, or "PO 344/1999", on 20 September 1999, which she lovingly christened as Le Décret pour la Solution Finale. And indeed, PO 344/1999 would set out to accomplish precisely what the High Inquisitor's nickname suggested of it. Under its terms, all foetuses across the Purgation State tested and found to be Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel were to be aborted. Any newborns which had evaded that pre-natal testing process and which were tested and found to be Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel post-birth were to be euthanised. And any person found to have conceived more than three Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel foetuses or newborns in their entire lifetime were to be involuntarily sterilised. It would become a serious criminal offence for any doctor or nurse or other medical staff to fail to perform such checks and execute and comply with these requirements vis-à-vis their patients, and in a similar vein, it would also be a criminal offence for any person to knowingly and/or deliberately conceal the fact that they had conceived a Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel foetus or newborn from the authorities or medical professionals. PO 344/1999 even referred to such violators as Les Traîtres à notre Sang, or Gene Traitors for short. The punishment for Gene Traitors was a simple one - re-classification as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, with all the natural consequences that follow, namely, 'liquidation through labour' in one of the Purgation State's many 'des facilités de liquidation'. In the High Inquisitor's own words accompanying her promulgation of PO 344/1999, the purpose of that order was to 'secure all of the progress we have achieved in our battle against the Dysfonctionnel', amounting to a 'critical guardrail against dysgenic backsliding and potential genetic degeneration, to secure the future of our children, our progeny, and that of all their heirs and descendants to come, by ensuring that we do not recklessly squander away all of the eugenic gains that our nation and people have worked so tirelessly to accomplish thus far'.

And since PO 344/1999 amounted to 'delegated legislation' - i.e., the High Inquisitor enacting subsidiary legislation on her own accord whilst acting under the delegated authority of the Souverain - and thereby susceptible (in theory) to being challenged before the ordinary courts of law for being ultra vires, accordingly, at the very next EDP meeting of 25 September 1999, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would codify all of the terms and provisions of Le Décret pour la Solution Finale into Executive Order (EO) No. 312 of 1999, signed and promulgated by his own hand. That formal ratification of PO 344/1999 in EO 312/1999 would all but guarantee that the High Inquisitor's sweeping new requirements for the mandatory genetic testing of foetuses and newborns across the nation would be foisted upon a solid and incontestable legal foundation within the Purgation constitutional order.

by **Purgatio** » Sat Aug 19, 2023 11:49 pm

Royalist Restoration and Return of the Purgation Aristocracy (1999-2000)

Soon after the Magnificus Dominus had declared victory over the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel on 18 September 1999, and after the national celebrations of 19-21 September had died down, the PNL Government would very soon find yet another occasion to throw one more glamorous national celebration, with the announcement of the nation's first ever coronation ceremony to occur in nearly two centuries of the country's history. At the next EDP meeting on 10 October 1999, Media and Culture Secretary Marquisa de Taillefer would make a proposal of her own. According to the minutes, she would begin by surmising at that meeting that the nation could use another 'special occasion' to celebrate the country's 'restoration' and to 'represent and symbolise her recent rebirth and rejuvenation under this government'. She added that that 'special occasion' would need to be one 'even grander and more glorious than the recent bout of festivities', and would need to have 'immense historical and cultural significance' to 'represent the historic glorious heights this nation once achieved, so the people of this nation can revel in the pomp, the ceremony, and the pageantry of our impending return to that lofty status once more as we swiftly sweep away all of the shackles and burdens that have stifled and weighed our people down for over a century'.

Her proposal would be for the nation to formally abolish the remaining vestiges of 'liberal decadent republicanism' by returning the country to its original pre-Revolution status as a 'unified and harmonious Royaume bounded together in solidarity by a living embodiment of the realm, a strong and cohesive Souverain'. She described it as a 'symbolic restoration' that would make for a 'grand occasion to rally this nation and uplift the spirits of her people', while 'formally repudiating all of the burdensome, obstructive, and degenerative notions of liberal constitutional government which have stymied and stifled this nation's potential for far too long'.

Many on the EDP spoke out in favour of the idea, with Foreign Secretary Alain describing the would-be coronation as a 'lovely occasion indeed that sounds absolutely delightful', Education Secretary Urbain positively suggesting that it would 'certainly complement our educational programmes enlightening our future generations on the follies and decadences of the so-called 'enlightened' age of republicanism that was responsible for the beginning of our national decline and degeneration', Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle opining that it could 'make for a most stirring and patriotic occasion to bring our people together as one', and Defence Secretary Juste-Charles agreeing that 'a coronation sounds like a rather beautiful and edifying idea' that could 'physically embody and represent, in its purest and most undistilled form, the unification and strengthening of our realm and the glorious restoration of our national people's community to its rightful place in this world'.

Not all members of the EDP expressed the same enthusiasm. Treasury Secretary Charlotte wondered aloud if the 'expense of the ceremony' would be worth the cost, while Commandant en Chef Delrico openly suggested that it 'seemed to me like a bout of pointless sentimentality, really', and Justice Secretary Devona would add that 'I don't personally go for all this pomp and ceremony stuff, but well, I suppose if other people are into it, I mean, who am I to judge I guess'. Nevertheless, none of the EDP members would express any strong opposition to the proposal, and their reactions appeared to range from enthusiastic support, on one end of the spectrum, to mere disinterested apathy on the other.

For his part, the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would state on the record that he was 'humbled' and 'honoured' by the suggestion, but would not make a decision either way to 'avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest on the matter'. Instead, he suggested, to avoid 'any appearance of impropriety', a governmental Commission should be established to investigate and evaluate any potential claims to the Valois crown and to make a neutral, non-partisan proposal as to which household or family had the strongest claim to being the successors of the old Valois dynasty and the rightful heirs to the last recognised monarch, that being the young Charles XI who had been forced into abdication back in 1823. He further proposed that that Commission's findings should then be presented to the Purgation National Congress (PNC) for its consideration, to avoid any 'allegations of bias'. There was broad agreement amongst the EDP members for that idea, and so the Magnificus Dominus would sign and promulgate Executive Order (EO) No. 391 of 1999 on 10 October 1999, formally establishing a Commission Royale for that purpose.

That Commission Royale, whose 25 members were appointed by the Ministry of Media and Culture and its Secretary of State, Marquisa de Taillefer, would consist of the most renowned and esteemed members of the Purgation artistic and cultural scene - top museum curators and gallery owners, trusted 'buyers' and 'taste-makers' for the nation's most renowned art exhibitions, theatres, opera-houses, and concert halls, trustees sitting on the boards of the nation's most prestigious cultural bodies, and the donors and philanthropists who funded the maintenance and preservation of the nation's 'high culture' and the socialites and high-society dilettantes who attended their fundraising galas and hosted their soirées, an elite milieu which was disproportionately dominated by the oldest aristocratic families in the country. The Chairperson of that Commission, in fact, would be the mother of the deceased Xavier de la Falaise, Sophie de la Falaise (née de Muset), whose family was responsible for pouring tens of millions of Élites annually into the nation's theatres, museums, art galleries, and opera-houses through its family foundation, La Fondation Patrimoniale du Grand-Duc de Minière. The Commission would be co-chaired by the head of the nation's Royal Arts Council or Conseil Royal des Arts, Ghislain-Marie du Jardin-de-Fleurs, hailing from another aristocratic family (La Maison du Jardin de Fleurs) that was also just as prominent in the nation's arts and charities scene.

The Commission Royale would hold its first meeting on 17 October 1999, and would very quickly reduce its findings into its formal Report on the State of the Purgation Monarchy by 3 December 1999. That report, unsurprisingly, chose the aristocratic household of La Maison de la Fayette as the family with the strongest claim to the demise of the Valois dynasty, the same household from which the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay and his sister Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle both hailed. Within the right-wing Purgation press, news channels such as the Halcyon News Network (HNN) and Les Potins du Matin would present the report's findings as 'obvious' and simply the product of an 'objective genealogical and ancestral analysis' by a 'most historically literate committee of the nation's finest patrons of our arts and culture'. Foreign media and commentators would generally treat the report's findings with a mixture of scepticism or downright cynicism, with many news outlets suggesting that the Commission Royale had entirely fabricated the household's claim to the Valois crown out of thin air to curry favour with the Magnificus Dominus and the ruling party, with one Animirian news editor writing of the report that it was 'nothing more than a rigged, shambolic, and hastily drawn-up process of utterly cynical and pretentious rubber-stamping'.

The reality was, however, rather a lot more nuanced than either such perspective, as is clear even from a closer examination of the contents of the Commission Royale's report, which merits further and more detailed examination. Briefly, the Report made the following findings:

That the monarch, drawing his power from the divine and absolutist mandate of the institution of the Peony Throne or the trône de la pivoine itself, could not logically exercise his powers in a fashion contrary to the mandate accorded by that throne, and thus had no legal or constitutional power to repudiate that same mandate from which he drew his authority;
That, accordingly, Le Saint-Roi Charles XI had no legal power to pronounce his abdication and the renunciation of his or his descendants' claims to the Peony Throne, and the Treaty of Novelli, insofar as it purported to promise the impossible, had always been legally null and void ab initio;
That all elected republican governments from 1823 onwards were therefore unlawful and constitutionally illegitimate as the very foundation of their authority (Charles XI's purported abdication and transfer of state authority to the revolutionaries in the Treaty of Novelli) had been null and void ab initio;
That the Peony Throne or trône de la pivoine lawfully remained in existence as an institution, and succession thereto remained governed to this date by the same rules of inheritance and succession, namely, that of agnatic primogeniture;
That the demise of the Valois dynasty to the institution of trône de la pivoine likewise remained legally valid and binding under the ancient constitutional order of Purgatio;
That the revolutionaries, in an attempt to suppress and pre-emptively erase all possible threats to the stability of their new revolutionary regime, had during the decade-long period of la terreur révolutionnaire (1825-1835) sent numerous assassins and hired mercenaries to track and hunt down all members of the royal House of Valois and all four of the Valois cadet branches in order to systematically assassinate all their members who had settled in Purgatio's neighbouring states, in a preventive attempt to preclude any future royalist restoration or prospective counter-revolution from unseating the revolutionaries from power;
That that campaign to extinguish the Valois family and all her cadet branches, having been completed successfully, meant that there were no longer any pure male-line heirs or descendants of Charles XI left to date who could inherit the Peony Throne from him under the old traditional rules of agnatic primogeniture;
That, accordingly, the Valois dynasty was left without any lawful heir to its demise unless the rules of inheritance were amended by the prevailing government to accommodate more liberal rules of inheritance such as absolute primogeniture or male-preference primogeniture which does not require a strictly pure male-only line of descent from Charles XI or the Valois kings who preceded him;
That, in order to assist the consideration of any such proposed amendments, the Commission would, in arguendo, go on to consider possible other claimants to the demise of the Valois dynasty based on her distaff branches (i.e., a maternal branch descended from a female progenitor) of the Valois royal family, to be assessed based upon the yardsticks of relative proximity to the last legitimate monarch of Purgatio, viz., Le Saint-Roi Charles XI;
That amongst the female relations of the Valois kings, the Commission could trace the male descendants thereof to five aristocratic households in the present day - namely, D'Artois household, Du Guise household, De Condé-en-Brie household, Des Viennoise household, and De La Fayette household; and finally,
That, amongst the five claimants, the Commission assessed that the De La Fayette family had the strongest claim based on proximity, and thus in its view, the true heir to the demise of the Valois dynasty to the mandate of the Peony Throne was, in fact, the present scion of La Maison de la Fayette, Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette, tracing his descent from a distaff branch of the Valois dynasty.

In assessing the relative strengths of the five possible claimants identified, the Commission adopted the approach of (1) assessing the proximity of the female progenitor of the Valois dynasty in terms of their consanguine proximity to the last legitimate monarch of Purgatio, Charles XI, to determine the relative strength of their claims; (2) adopting an approach of 'pure' or 'absolute' primogeniture without regard to sex, in other words, preferring a descendant of a female progenitor whose descent consisted of a mixture of men and women, based upon birth order preference alone without regard to sex, over a descendant of a female progenitor whose descent consisted of men only but included males holding a lesser birth order compared to their female siblings; and yet (3) preserving its adherence to the traditional rules of succession which excluded from consideration all children conceived out of wedlock, including illegitimate children (i.e., 'bastards'), adopted children, and step-children. In other words, the Commission's choices in the formulation of its assessment criteria seemed to involve a combination of adherences to, and departures from, ancient royal tradition, for example, by weighting birth order more highly than sex (in a deviation from the monarchy's tradition of patriarchal male-only agnatic primogeniture) whilst faithfully adhering to the rules of succession that excluded illegitimate children or other children conceived out of wedlock. These three discretionary choices ended up having great significance for the outcome of the Report, and it is no exaggeration to say that the Commission's election of these particular rules ended up being determinative of the eventual outcome of its assessed 'true heir' to Charles XI and the demise of the Valois dynasty.

Briefly, the Commission began by identifying four female members of the Valois dynasty who were deemed to be in the closest proximity, consanguinity-wise, to the last legitimate monarch, Charles XI, those being - (1) his sister and only sibling, Antoine de Valois de Geer (progenitor of the D'Artois family); (2) his older paternal aunt, Inès de Lancaster-Valois (progenitor of the Du Guise family and De La Fayette family both); (3) his younger paternal aunt, Marie des Viennoise (progenitor of the Des Viennoise family); and finally, (4) his paternal first cousin, Marguerite de Condé-en-Brie (progenitor of the De Condé-en-Brie family). The 'correct' choice between these five families and households was far from 'obvious' and was, in many ways, the product of a series of subjective discretionary choices to produce an outcome which certainly cannot be said to have been 'clear', 'objective', or purely 'logical' from the very outset. That much may be discerned from the reasoning employed by the Commission in its report to justify its eventual conclusion that the De La Fayette household was the 'strongest, closest, most legitimate successor' to the Peony Throne and the demise of the Valois dynasty thereto.

The Commission's starting position was that female progenitors in closer proximity to the last monarch were to be preferred over other female progenitors in lesser proximity, consanguinity-wise, to Charles XI. Thus, it considered the five claimant families based on that order of priority. Antoine de Valois de Geer was the only sibling of Charles XI (who died without children), making her the most proximate to Charles XI in terms of blood relation. She had five grand-children, two of whom died childless, two of whom never married and therefore fathered illegitimate children only, and one of whom (Diederik de Geer) did father a legitimate daughter, but that daughter (Frederika de Geer) was a homosexual and never conceived any biological in-wedlock children with a man, although she did legally adopt one son, was a testamentary guardian to her female partner's biological daughter from her ex-husband, and did conceive a biological son of her own (Maximilien d'Artois) through a surrogacy arrangement for a male homosexual friend of hers, Laurent d'Artois. The modern-day patriarch of the D'Artois family, Marc-Andre d'Artois, is also the biological and legitimate son of Maximilien d'Artois, thereby making him the biological great-great-great-grandson of Antoine de Valois de Geer. However, as the Commission decided to retain the traditional rule of royal succession of requiring a naturally conceived biological heir through intra-marital sexual relations only, it took the view that Antoine had no 'true heir' who could claim succession through her since none of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren had satisfied that criterion. Thus, the D'Artois family's claims were excluded from any further consideration.

Next, the Commission considered the next proximate female progenitor, Inès de Lancaster-Valois, the older sister and eldest sibling of Philippe VI, father of Charles XI. Inès married an aristocrat from the Cholmondeley Commonwealth, Walter Lancaster, and had three legitimate children with him, with the oldest daughter having died without bearing any children and the middle son having only fathered illegitimate children, leaving only her youngest child to consider, George Lancaster, who went on to conceive two legitimate children within his lifetime, Emily and Andrew Lancaster. Emily Lancaster would go on to marry a Purgation aristocrat, Tristen de la Fayette, and would give birth to only one child within wedlock, Lancelot de la Fayette. His eldest legitimate son, Romain de la Fayette, would go on to be the grandfather of Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette.

Andrew Lancaster would also have two children of his own, George Lancaster Jr. and Blanche Lancaster (who went on to marry a nobleman from the Principality of Lascelles, Arthur du Guise, and became Blanche du Guise in the process). Two different members of the Du Guise family from Lascelles would claim to be able to trace their ancestry from Andrew Lancaster and his two children. Mathieu du Guise was the grandson of George Lancaster Jr., but only through his illegitimate son, Lucien du Guise, who had been the product of a scandalous and quasi-incestuous love affair when George Lancaster Jr. cheated on his wife and impregnated Élise du Guise, the sister of his brother-in-law Arthur du Guise, which had caused a huge stir within Lascellian high society at the time. The young George Lancaster Jr. would not father any legitimate children because shortly after that scandal broke out, his wife would successfully file for annulment against him on the grounds of the non-consummation of their marriage, and his ruined social reputation all but guaranteed that he would be treated as an unmarriageable pariah, at least within the narrow elite milieu of the Lascellian high society circles. Meanwhile, Juliette du Guise was the granddaughter of Blanche du Guise, but this time through a legitimate son of hers, Henri du Guise. The Commission then compared the rival claims of Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette against Mathieu and Juliette du Guise. It excluded Mathieu's claim because it reasoned that he could not claim his descent from a father (Lucien) who had been born out of wedlock. The Commission then preferred Chalon-Arlay's claim over Juliette's on the basis that it would follow a rule of 'absolute primogeniture' in assessing proximity to the last monarch of Purgatio. Since Emily Lancaster was older than Andrew Lancaster, the descendants of Emily should be preferred over Andrew's, because the Commission took the approach of preferring birth order over sex. Moreover, it added that the fact that Chalon-Arlay was descended from the eldest son of Romain de la Fayette, namely, Raphael de la Fayette, strengthened his claim and gave it more weight than Juliette's claim, since she not only had to claim under a younger son (Andrew Lancaster), but also his younger daughter thereafter (Blanche du Guise).

That only left the task of comparing Chalon-Arlay's claim over that of the Des Viennoise and De Condé-en-Brie households. The head of the Des Viennoise family, Margaux des Viennoise, was the great-great-granddaughter of Marie des Viennoise, the younger sister of Philippe VI, father of Charles XI. And the head of the De Condé-en-Brie family, Hugo-Baptiste de Condé-en-Brie, was the great-great-great-grandson of Marguerite de Condé-en-Brie, the older sister and eldest sibling of Étienne V, father of Philippe VI and grandfather of Charles XI. Both of these claimants were also able to claim descent from their respective female progenitors through a male-only line of eldest sons. Nevertheless, their claims were still deemed inferior to Chalon-Arlay's because the Commission took the starting point of considering the consanguinity and proximity of the original female progenitor, from whom the claimant is claiming descent, to the last monarch of Purgatio, Charles XI, to assess the weight and legitimacy of the claim. This automatically ruled out the claims of Hugo-Baptiste de Condé-en-Brie and that of the De Condé-en-Brie family since they were claiming their descent through a paternal great-aunt of Charles XI, which in the Commission's view ranked hierarchically lower as a less-proximate claim than that of the De La Fayette family, which was claiming their descent through a paternal aunt of Charles XI.

That only left the task of weighting the De La Fayette claim against the Des Viennoise claim. The former was claiming through the older sister of Charles XI's father, Philippe VI, whereas the latter was claiming through the younger sister of Philippe VI. In terms of consanguinity and blood relation alone, it is clear that an older sister is obviously no more or less proximate of a blood relationship than a younger sister to the male sibling in question. However, the Commission also adopted an approach of 'absolute primogeniture', that is, prioritising birth order to the exclusion of any considerations of sex. Consequently, it ranked Chalon-Arlay's claim as superior by virtue of his family claiming descent through the older sister of Philippe VI, Inès de Lancaster-Valois, whose claim must rank superior to, and enjoy priority over, that of Philippe VI's younger sister, Marie des Viennoise. This was so even though Chalon-Arlay was claiming his descent through a daughter of Inès de Lancaster-Valois (Emily Lancaster), whereas the Des Viennoise heiress was claiming her descent through a son of Marie des Viennoise (Alexandre des Viennoise), because the Commission's approach of 'absolute primogeniture' had the effect of prioritising considerations of birth order over considerations of sex.

In other words, the combination of discretionary choices made by the Commission Royale in terms of the rules and yardsticks it would apply to assess the relative legitimacy of different claims and ostensible 'proximity' to the last monarch of Purgatio had the cumulative effect of producing the result that the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette was found to be the true and most legitimate heir to the Valois dynasty. Thus, although it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the Commission Royale invented the claims of the De La Fayette household to the Purgation throne out of complete thin air, it is also fair to say that the Commission did exercise its discretion when weighing and comparing rival claims to the Purgation throne in such a manner that it consequentially ended up preferring the claims of the De La Fayette family and finding those claims to be the 'most legitimate' in its view.

When the Commission's report was produced, it was put before the PNC on 12 December 1999, which ratified all of the report's findings in PNC Legislative Motion (LM) No. 110 of 1999 or LM-110 for short, by a very comfortable margin of 308-0, with 149 abstentions and 213 absentees. LM-110 declared, in short, that Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette was the true heir to the Valois dynasty and the Peony Throne, being descended from the 'legitimate successor' to the extinct Valois dynasty, Inès de Lancaster-Valois, by way of absolute primogeniture. It consequently declared him to be the first ever Le Grand Roi de la Purgatio, and declared that all heirs and descendants to the Peony Throne would, from thenceforth, be determined by rules of absolute primogeniture traced from Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette or, in the event of his demise without children, then from Inès de Lancaster-Valois before him. The effect of LM-110 was therefore to transform the Purgation State from a one-party fascistic dictatorship to an absolute hereditary monarchy, but with its head of state nevertheless remaining exactly the same as it was before. From then on, the offices of head of government (Magnificus Dominus) and head of state (Le Grand Roi) would be, in theory, separate institutions, but in practice were held and possessed by the exact same occupant, Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette. Whether all valid law in the Purgation State thereafter flowed from the sovereignty of the Magnificus Dominus or from Le Grand Roi is consequently an academic constitutional legal question which has not had an opportunity to be tested or determined either way, simply by virtue of the occupant of both offices being the same person.

While Chalon-Arlay would officially become Le Grand Roi de la Purgatio on 12 December 1999, his formal ceremonial coronation as such would only take place on 28 July 2000, following months of preparation and planning of the ceremony and a lavish renovation and refurbishment of the old palatial retreat of the Valois monarchy, Le Palais du Million des Verres-Brisés, which Le Grand Roi Chalon-Arlay declared to be the seat of the new official capital city of the Purgation State of Auxiliora, by way of his very first royal edict on 13 December 1999. The coronation ceremony would be a most lavish affair costing the Treasury over $160 million Élites for the ceremony alone, not including the $18.7 million Élites expended for the renovation of the old palace itself. The PNL government would work to transform the ceremony into a most glamorous and enchanting affair, playing host to over 2,500 Purgation aristocrats - including many members of the Executive Directorate, including Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, Defence Secretary Juste-Charles de Givenchy, and PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille - replete with opera singers, ballroom dancing, a string quartet, a philharmonic orchestra, a classical chorus performed by a group of choirboys, a huge military parade involving PICOS troopers and Purification Order paramilitary soldiers, the marching of the royal guard, the crowning of Chalon-Arlay as Le Grand Roi, his wife Geneviève as La Grande Reine, followed by Chalon-Arlay naming his sister Jeanne-Emmanuelle as the new La Princesse Royale and his twelve-year-old daughter, Françoise-Valentine de la Fayette, as his heir apparent and the new La Princesse de la Couronne and La Princesse d'Auxiliora, with both bowing before a throne that was adorned and embellished with beautiful elegant peony crests in order to be crowned by Le Grand Roi with historical yet jewelled coronets, and finally topped off at the end with a series of ritzy and opulent gifts being rolled out, displayed, and lavished upon the new royals by some of the nation's wealthiest aristocratic families, including rare fine art, jewels, watches, wine collections, and ancient feudalistic artefacts as tangible objects of cultural heritage, including old knightly swords from long defunct chivalric orders, along with daggers, chainmail, chalices, goblets, lances, garters, coronets, original seals of various guilds and coats of arms of various orders, and many more. It all made for a staid yet lavish affair performed in an ornate palatial setting and publicised and televised to over a billion Purgations across the nation, culminating in a most celebratory ceremony meant to enchant and inspire the Purgation people with all the traditionalist revelry and the elegant and ethereal allure of the glorious pageantry and enchanting regalia of a revived historical age associated, in the eyes of many conservative-minded segments of the Purgation populace at least, with the glory, honour, and prestige of the country's imperialist and aristocratic past.

The right-wing tabloids, broadsheets, and news channels friendly to the PNL regime assisted greatly in propagating the Purgation government's intended message which it sought to convey through that lavish and glamorous affair, both in the weeks and months leading up to, and after, the coronation ceremony. On 28 July 2000, the first ever royal correspondent of Le Courrier Purgatien would describe the ceremony as 'an historic yet deeply nostalgic moment for our nation' that was 'moving and enthralling in harkening back so beautifully and elegantly to a halcyon period of our country's history when our dominance over this continent was unquestioned, our polity was at peace, and our economic and military prowess truly unparalleled in this world'. The next day, on 29 July 2000, the editorial team of La Voix du Royaume would suggest that the ceremony was a 'clear and incontestable symbolic representation of just how far this country has come', suggesting that 'such opulent and extravagant sights would have been truly unthinkable during the rot, decay, and degeneracy of this nation's dark past, we have come a long way from that dark history of ours under the strong and stable leadership of a bold, decisive Souverain who can actually get things done and herald the glories of this country without the weight and shackles of decadent liberalism and constitutional enslavement', ending off with the assertion that the coronation ceremony was a 'most positive sign that, just like the old kings of our glorious imperialistic past, this country can now, finally, truly become great and glorious once more, blessed once again with a model of governance that favours strength over weakness, unity over partisan division, and true honour over decadent self-indulgence'. And the day after, on 30 July 2000, a columnist in L'Homme Couronné would drive the point home with the simple statement that 'if ever our enemies within needed a tell-tale sign of the strength and greatness of our new and reinvigorated Royaume, they need only have turned to their television screens to witness before their very eyes the rebirth of our nation and people, embodied and made flesh in the glories, the majesties, and the most exquisite grace and beauty of her Souverain - an irrefutable symbol of all this family has accomplished for our realm in just a decade or so - that they may watch, tremblingly obey, and show no negligence'.

That reactionary restoration of Purgatio's monarchical past would be sealed with yet another royal edict of Le Grand Roi Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette, signed and issued on 31 July 2000 shortly after his coronation, which he entitled the "Edict for the Reversal of Seditious Expropriations and Unlawful Usurpations of Seigneurial Privileges". As the edict's name suggested, it purported to 'restore' all seigneurial privileges of the old Purgation aristocracy which had been swept away by the Revolutionary Consulate's Great Liberal Reformations of 1823-1824, which had included, amongst other reforms, the abolition of all fiefdoms and seigneurial rights over feudal domains. The royal edict did not, however, actually restore all feudal rights and privileges, since the seizure of all lands and the conversion of all landed estates back into the system of enfeoffed and sub-enfeoffed manorial land tenures that existed before the Purgation Revolution would have caused massive disruption to the real estate industry and banking sectors and would in fact have entailed the wholesale upending and uprooting of practically every single sale or leasing of any land that had occurred in the past 180 years or so. Instead, all the edict purported to do was to, first, restore to the Purgation nobility their pre-Revolution titles and ranks, in law, and second, to restore to the Purgation nobility the demesne which had not been leased out or sub-enfeoffed to any sub-tenants or vassals prior to its expropriation and annulment by the onset of the Purgation Revolution, which was a far less ambitious task. Nevertheless, it would still require a Restoration Committee to be set up to examine the necessary paperwork and perform the laborious 'root of title' investigations needed to ascertain which plots of land needed to be seized and expropriated without compensation by the government (which the edict rationalised and re-framed as a reversal of past wrongful expropriations) before being 'returned' to the land's 'rightful owners', namely, the descendants of the feudal aristocratic households which had held the title to that land before the Purgation Revolution.

That edict, not so coincidentally, ended up benefitting many in the ruling PNL government and the EDP Cabinet, many of whom scooped up the largest portions of land through the Restoration Committee's sweeping seizures and expropriations in the name of 'righting historical wrongs' and of providing 'fair and just restitution ad integrum' for all of the Revolution's 'seditious non-recognitions of basic fundamental seigneurial rights and feudal incidents'. A castle and surrounding 101,000 acres of land in an outlying part of Saint-Sévérin were seized from a real estate company and 'returned' to Christian de Laval, the husband of the Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval, as the 'rightful' Comte de Saint-Sévérin. A manor-house and its surrounding 138,000 acres of land in a rural pastoral area of Thiaffait were requisitioned from over 20 different farming families and gifted over to the Defence Secretary Juste-Charles de Givenchy as the 'rightful' Marquis de Thiaffait. Another huge plot of land consisting of over 151,000 acres in a heavily populated metropolitan area of Provence was seized from a number of banks and landlords, with tens of thousands of tenants being summarily evicted without notice or compensation, to be returned to the 'rightful' Duc de Provence, the Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday. Another grand estate in Savoy-Ducasse was carved out after the Restoration Committee seized and joined together more than 163,000 acres of land which it had commandeered without compensation from a number of winery and agricultural companies and 'returned' to Jean-Louis de Lussan, the husband of the Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, as the 'rightful' Duc de Savoy-Ducasse, with the whole estate being converted into a massive palatial countryside retreat for the members of the De Lussan family and retrenching tens of thousands of agricultural farm workers as redundancies in the process. Another generous domain in the densely-populated metropolitan city of Poisson was demarcated with over 168,000 acres of prime real estate being 'returned' to the wife of the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet, Sylvie de Vérac, as the 'rightful' Duchesse de Poisson, with tens of thousands of tenants being evicted from numerous rental apartments to be razed down for a massive luxury condominium development project, with an additional 37,000 acres or so of rural pastoral farmlands in the rustic countryside of Val-des-Larmes being 'restored' to Sylvie de Vérac as the 'rightful' Marquise de Val-des-Larmes, with numerous independent tenant farmers being evicted from their land to make way for a giant personal vineyard and wine-press for the benefit of the De Charlet-Vérac family. And the biggest beneficiary of them all was, of course, Le Grand Roi himself, being the successor to 17 different noble titles and feudal estates, the Restoration Committee seized over 270,000 acres of land all over the country for the benefit of him and his family, including plots of land in Avidité, Ravaliér, Auxiliora, Lyons, Provençal, and Barres, including a 108,000-acres plot of land in a rural pastoral area of Auxiliora seized from a number of tenant farmers and returned to the 'rightful' Prince d'Auxiliora, and another 51,000-acres plot of land in a densely-populated part of Avidité seized from numerous banks, real estate companies, landlords, and commercial tenants, which was also to be 'restored' to the 'rightful' Grand Duc d'Avidité, Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette, all of which were swiftly and summarily reinstated in his family's possession as a form of 'restitution of title'.

These sweeping expropriations were once again marketed and framed to the Purgation public, by the PNL-friendly right-wing media, in the same reactionary and nostalgic fashion that the monarchical restoration had been presented, as representing a return to a more glorious and harmonious era of Purgatio's aristocratic past, a supposed halcyon epochal era with power concentrated in the hands of an honourable and capable elite, with the power and wisdom to lead the Purgation people onward into a greater and far more majestic future, unchecked and unburdened by corrosive decadent liberalism and divisive fractious factionalism. Now, with that royal edict in force, the privileged descendants of the old Purgation aristocracy were back in charge of the country, not just de facto, but de jure as well.

by **Purgatio** » Sun Aug 20, 2023 9:15 pm

Onset of Hostilities with Purgatio's Neighbours (2000-2009)

Shortly after the fanfare and pageantry of the recent royalist and aristocratic restorations that had swept across the nation with much glamorous pomp and ceremony, the Purgation State would soon find itself at war with all of her neighbours within the following decade of its history. These wars would have a variety of causes, some ideological, some strategic, some brought on by the constraints of internal politics, but the end-result would be a serious deterioration in relations between Purgatio and her neighbours, and in particular, the Animirian Federation and the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia.

The primary catalyst for the outbreak of La Première Guerre de Nettoyage Génétique or the so-called First Cleansing War of 2000-2002 was the gradual dying down and thawing out of the ongoing GEM insurgency and the Purgation civil war between the regular PAF military and irregular GEM guerrilla insurgents in the Purgation northwest. After a decade of exhausting guerrilla warfare, the PAF's 'search and destroy' tactics and the harassment and mass detentions perpetrated on a massive scale by PICOS and the Purification Order had greatly assisted in suppressing and pacifying large swathes of the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan which had formerly been hotbeds of resistance activities. By the start of the year 2000, the GEM rebels held only small swathes of land on the northwestern frontiers of both cantons, centred around small townships like Haute-Voise and Val-de-Lissée in Villehardouin and Quesoin and Erlignon in Lusignan.

The GEM had been driven underground and into hiding, its guerrilla fighters blending into the civilian population before conducting small-scale 'hit-and-run' or 'lone-wolf' attacks on PAF military bases, supply lines, materiel convoys, or smaller infantry regiments scattered across the countryside. As the PAF's offensive to crush and occupy the last remaining vestiges of GEM control escalated and intensified in 2000, the GEM's leadership and core membership began to flee into neighbouring countries, including the Republic of Stratford (which bordered the District of Villehardouin), the Koháry Federation (which bordered the District of Lusignan), and the Constitutional Kingdom of Boisschot (which bordered both Districts). By May 2000, the Purgation Intelligence Agency (PIA) began to receive intelligence reports indicating that the two main leaders of the GEM, Clément Languet and Brigitte Clairvaux, had been spotted in the border town of Warocqué in Boisschot. The GEM began to flee into these 'border cities', to be used as safe havens to re-group, re-arm, re-supply, and recover their strength before re-entering Purgation territory to launch renewed guerrilla attacks and assaults upon the PAF, effectively utilising the frontier regions as a 'launching ground' for the GEM's ongoing insurgency against the PNL government and the PAF military.

This intelligence was immediately brought to the attention of the High Office of the Magnificus Dominus in a PIA memorandum dated 12 May 2000, and an official EDP meeting was convened on 18 May 2000 to discuss the matter. The EDP was at first divided on how to respond to the news. Hardliners such as the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet and the High Inquisitor of PICOS Geneviève de la Fayette wanted the Magnificus Dominus to provide his formal authorisation for PICOS and Purification Order forces to cross the Purgatio-Boisschot border and root-out the GEM insurgents from hiding in the border towns. Moderates on the EDP expressed concerns about such a proposal, with Defence Secretary Juste-Charles de Givenchy not wanting to risk a full-scale war breaking out between Purgatio and her neighbours, Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval expressing concerns over the expense of funding such a military conflict which could drag on for years especially as several billions of Élites had already been expended by the Treasury to fund the PAF's military efforts against the decade-long insurgency of the GEM from 18 November 1990 to date, and Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday feared the impact it would have on Purgatio's relations with her neighbours if she were perceived to be an aggressive and belligerent force attempting to expand her borders and encroach upon the territorial sovereignty of the surrounding countries. In his words, 'at the moment any international concerns expressed about our new government are limited strictly to concerns over our domestic sphere, criticisms which the international community may believe about how we govern ourselves, but once we cross the figurative Rubicon into foreign territory, we cease to be viewed as a mere abuser of human rights at home, but an expansionist, imperialistic, revanchist force to be countered and defeated by all our neighbours. That is not the sort of international reputation that provokes a sternly-worded letter of condemnation. It is the sort of global opinion that provokes a full-scale war of all our neighbours banding together against us, to quash and quell what they will perceive as a threat to their sovereignty and independence'.

As the EDP meeting dragged on into the morning and then the afternoon of the next day, and with the military leadership on the EDP expressing their opposition to any 'intrusions or incursions upon foreign territory that could provoke full-scale war with foreign belligerents whilst the Purgation Armed Forces are already having to contend with the militant insurgency and aggression of the GEM terrorists in the northwestern frontiers', the Magnificus Dominus would close out the meeting on 19 May 2000 with an indication on the record that he was opposed to any Purification Order or PICOS incursions into the territory of Boisschot or other neighbours of Purgatio, and gave an oral direction for the Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday to liaise diplomatically with the Boisschot government to facilitate the identification and extradition of Clément Languet, Brigitte Clairvaux, and other GEM militants that may be hiding away in the border regions to escape the PAF's continuing 'search and destroy' operations.

In the months of May to July of 2000, the Foreign Office would make diplomatic endeavours to seek the cooperation of the governments of Koháry, Stratford, and Boisschot to obtain intelligence and information as to the whereabouts of the GEM military leaders in various border towns and cities, but none of these diplomatic entreatments would prove fruitful or useful, with the various governments in question often providing non-committal replies that they had no useful intelligence or information to offer about the alleged whereabouts of the GEM forces inquired about. Whether these were acts of intentional and deliberate stonewalling by these governments who were simply uninterested in looking into the Purgation government's enquiries or even knowingly harbouring GEM insurgents within their territories or were good faith, bona fide replies which expressed the genuine view of these governments that they had not been able to acquire useful information on any alleged GEM activities or operations within their borders despite their best endeavours, has been a matter of great historical and academic speculation. At successive EDP meetings during this period, however, the hardliners on the EDP, and increasingly the conventional PAF's military leadership as well, would interpret these responses as clear and conclusive proof that Purgatio's neighbours were intentionally harbouring GEM militants within their borders in order to undermine Purgation national security and destabilise the present government, in furtherance of their own foreign policy interests.

During this period, the slant and tenor of the media reports on the Dysfonctionnel community and ongoing GEM insurgency within the Purgation right-wing press began to change ever-so-slightly. Previously, news channels like Les Potins du Matin and the Halcyon News Network (HNN) and the usual Courvoisier-owned and De Sablé-controlled tabloids like Le Courrier Purgatien, Nous Sommes Tannés!, La Voix du Royaume, and La Petite Auxiliorienne, had only focussed on demonising and fear-mongering over the alleged actions of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel within Purgatio's borders, whether it was the alleged antisocial, criminal, or disruptive behaviours of individual Dysfonctionnel in various anecdotal reports or portrayals which fixated upon the dangers of the GEM's disruptive protests, acts of civil disobedience, and subsequent terrorist insurgency and violent insurrection as reflective of some broader genetically ingrained parasitical disposition of the Dysfonctionnel which rendered them existential menaces to the Purgation community as a whole. From June 2000 onwards, however, the right-wing media's coverage pivoted slightly to focus on the threat posed by the Dysfonctionnel outside Purgatio's borders, with a particular focus and fixation on alleged Dysfonctionnel activities within the border nations of Stratford, Koháry, and Boisschot.

For example, on 26 June 2000, the HNN news channel would run a sensationalist news story with the eye-catching breaking news headline of "'Border Town Ravaged; Dysfonctionnel Thugs Lay Waste to Caisçon from Koháry, Over 4,000 Feared Dead!", which claimed that the GEM had launched an assault from Koháry territory which occupied and then destroyed the Purgation border city of Caisçon in the District of Lusignan, driving out the PAF garrison in the area before burning the entire town to the ground and seizing and abducting thousands of women and children as sex slaves before massacring large swathes of the adult male population and fleeing back into Koháry with their new captives. While it was true that the GEM insurgents had launched a surprise assault upon PAF soldiers in the township of Caisçon on the night of 25 June 2000, which resulted in 101 PAF casualties and drove the remaining PAF forces out of the city, with the GEM militants retreating back into Koháry territory on the morning of the 26th of June before the PAF forces could re-group and return to Caisçon with reinforcements, the more lurid accounts about GEM militants massacring the civilian population or seizing and abducting random women and children to be sold into sexual slavery could not be independently verified and were likely fabrications. Nevertheless, similar stories would be repeated by the Purgation right-wing press en masse, with more vivid and colourful accounts of GEM atrocities being visited upon the Purgation border towns and cities in the northwestern frontier regions of the country by GEM militants who launched surprise attacks before fleeing and retreating back into their hideouts in Stratford, Koháry, and Boisschot before the PAF could respond and retaliate with reprisal attacks. By July 2000, news channels and tabloids had begun to outright allege that the governments of these border nations were either intentionally harbouring the GEM insurgents to undermine Purgation national security or actively collaborating with the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel to destroy the Purgation nation from within.

The subject-matter scope that was traversed by such news reports regarding Purgatio's neighbours emanating from the PNL-friendly press was not limited to covering GEM insurgent attacks alone. Many right-wing tabloids would further speculate or outright allege that Purgatio's neighbours were also collaborating with other Dysfonctionnel groups, such as the notorious criminal syndicate Les Frérots, the Islamist terrorist group The Brigade of Deir Yassin, and remnants of the Marxist-Leninist socialist insurgent group L'Épée du Peuple (many of whom had joined forces with the GEM by this point in time). Many of these groups and organisations did not confine their operations to Purgatio alone, and when the PNL regime conducted a massive nationwide crackdown on violent and organised crime, many of these groups fled or shifted their criminal operations to Purgatio's neighbours, in which they were already active prior to the PNL's rise to power in 1987-1988. Les Frérots, for instance, had run a massive regional drug trafficking, 'people smuggling', and extortionate racketeering operation throughout the region, which included branches operating within the borders of Purgatio, Animiria, Stulitia, Boisschot, Koháry, Lascelles, Esterházy, Stratford, Cholmondeley, and Arenberg, amongst other nations, long before the PNL had ever been founded as a political party in 1981. Purgation news media could fixate upon accounts of criminal syndicated operations being conducted by members of Les Frérots in the border nations of Boisschot, Koháry, and Stratford to further fuel the narrative that these nations were 'hotbeds of Dysfonctionnel activities' and that these governments were 'collaborating with the Dysfonctionnel to destroy Purgatio, both from within and without' by 'according them a safe haven and free hand to operate with impunity and destroy our nation and people from behind their border'.

The exact causes of this 'pivot' in the Purgation right-wing press in May-July 2000 are not entirely clear. It may have been the product of the deliberate efforts of the hardliner extremists on the EDP Cabinet who had grown frustrated with the perceived stonewalling and inaction of Purgatio's neighbouring governments to do anything to curtail GEM insurgent activities in the border towns and cities and who wanted to drum up public support for a prospective war with these nations or it may have been an organic 'bottom-up' decision by individual media organisations or journalists to extend the news media's negative coverage of the Dysfonctionnel outside of Purgatio's borders, especially in light of the thawing-out of the internal insurgency of the GEM in the northwest coupled with the recent claims of the PNL government that they had 'won' the war against the Dysfonctionnel within Purgatio's borders necessitating an outward shift in media coverage to fixate on threats outside of Purgation territory, or perhaps it was a combination of the two, or something else entirely. Whatever the case may have been, the effect would be a massive reinvigoration of the Purgation far-right, with the relatively dormant Ça Suffit! (which had become comparatively inactive after it had attained its aim for the government to support the genocidal eradication of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel within Purgatio's borders) soon seeing a sudden rise in its political activism and agitative activities from June 2000 onwards, with more and more Ça Suffit! rallies, demonstrations, and events being held once more to call for the PNL government to 'finish the job' by rooting out and eliminating the Dysfonctionnel hiding away in the borders of Purgatio's immediate neighbours, and especially the neighbours of Koháry, Stratford, and Boisschot which were bordering the Districts of Villehardouin and Lusignan. Many Ça Suffit! demonstrations numbering tens of thousands of assembled participants began to gather outside PAF barracks and garrisons in Ravaliér, demanding loudly for the immediate invasion of Koháry, Stratford, and Boisschot to eliminate the remaining Dysfonctionnel hiding out across the border, with the familiar rhythmic chants of "Éradiquons tous les Cafards!" once more.

When the EDP returned for another meeting on 20 July 2000 to receive an update from the Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday as to his continuing efforts to obtain the cooperation and good offices of the Koháry, Stratford, and Boisschot governments in locating and extraditing the GEM terrorists hiding away within their borders, the Foreign Secretary candidly admitted that he had 'continued to receive unhelpful responses from our diplomatic partners'. The PAF's military leadership, namely the Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle d'Erlanger, as well as Defence Secretary Juste-Charles de Givenchy, indicated for the first time on record that they were now in favour of PICOS and Purification Order incursions into Purgatio's border regions to root out the GEM insurgents for good, coupled with PAF military action to defend those incursions if need be. High Inquisitor Geneviève and Commandant en Chef Delrico were ecstatic at this change in tune, and requested for the Magnificus Dominus to authorise a pre-emptive strike into the border nations in question and for the PAF to occupy the border regions such that PICOS troopers and Purification Order soldiers may enter the occupied border zones and begin their sweeps and searches for any GEM or other Dysfonctionnel persons therein to be hunted down and exterminated.

However, Foreign Secretary Alain cautioned that a pre-emptive strike would be 'overkill' in his view, since the threat of potential military action may be enough to pressure the foreign governments into taking the Purgation requests for their assistance much more seriously, and Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval would agree, suggesting that 'if war with our neighbours can be avoided, I think we should at least attempt to avoid a wider military conflagration unless absolutely necessary'. Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle took a similar view and remarked that 'we mustn't act in a belligerent and foolhardy way and stumble into an unnecessary war that may be long-drawn, costly, and require a much more burdensome commitment than we may anticipate at the outset', and counselling that 'due caution should be exercised in this regard'.

The compromise proposal struck by the Magnificus Dominus was for a sternly worded ultimatum to be relayed to the governments of Boisschot, Koháry, and Stratford, in which the possibility of military action to protect Purgation security interests within their borders would be strongly hinted at unless the demands in the ultimatum were complied with. Neither side on the EDP was entirely placated by that compromise, and particularly the hardliner extremists like Commandant en Chef Delrico and High Inquisitor Geneviève who still favoured a pre-emptive strike and 'surprise invasion' of Purgatio's neighbours, but no serious opposition was expressed to the idea of sending an ultimatum first to attempt to avoid a war, if possible. Hence, the famous July Ultimatums of 2000 were drafted by the Foreign Secretary and the Magnificus Dominus during a full EDP meeting on 21 July 2000, with the precise wording employed being discussed amongst the EDP portfolio-holders thereat, following which they were transmitted to the Koháry, Boisschot, and Stratford embassies in Ravaliér on the evening of 22 July 2000, to be relayed to their respective governments back home.

The July Ultimatums demanded that the respective governments either send their own law enforcement units to pacify the border towns, systematically search for and then root-out all of the GEM and other Dysfonctionnel insurgents hiding away thereat, and then extradite them across the border to the Purgation forces presently operating in the northwestern frontiers of the cantons of Villehardouin and Lusignan, or alternatively, that they permit PICOS troopers and Purification Order paramilitaries to enter the border towns themselves to conduct the necessary searches on their own accord if the respective governments were unwilling or unable to do so with their own resources. The July Ultimatums demanded of the recipient governments that a formal acknowledgement of the demand and an agreement to comply with either of the two options presented should be relayed to the Purgation government by the close of 28 July 2000, or 'otherwise it will be assumed that your cooperation and assistance on these essential and fundamental security concerns of the Purgation State is not, in fact, forthcoming', and warning that 'consequently the Purgation State will have no choice but to resort to the adoption of the necessary emergency redressive measures to efficaciously put to rest the pressing and ongoing exigent problem of Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel terrorism and insurgency plaguing our border regions in the cantons of Villehardouin and Lusignan via whatever means or options may be available to the Purgation State to do so'.

PAF tanks, armoured vehicles, and mobile infantry units began to amass on the Purgation-Koháry, Purgation-Boisschot, and Purgation-Stratford borders from the morning of 23 July 2000 onwards, and when the Purgation ambassadors and Foreign Office failed to receive any affirmative reply by the deadline of 28 July 2000 as communicated in the July Ultimatums, PAF forces finally launched an invasion of all three nations five minutes pass midnight on the 29th of July, 2000, thereby beginning the First Cleansing War of 2000-2002 in earnest. Each of the three nations that were invaded had populations of less than 100 million each, with land areas ranging from 12-15,000 km²; hence, the PAF managed to overrun and takeover the territories of the three nations by 3 September 2000, following which the PAF had to begin sweeping across the conquered territories to mop up remnants of the defeated national armies and put down any nationalist or pro-independence insurgency movements which had arisen, to prepare the ground for PICOS and the Purification Order to cross the border and begin their usual 'search and exterminate' operations, to locate and exterminate the Dysfonctionnel within the borders of the three conquered territories.

The leaders of the GEM, Clément Languet and Brigitte Clairvaux, were also found and located hiding in a safe-house in the Boisschot city of Annendhen by PAF soldiers on 31 July 2000, and were immediately seized and transported to the Purgation city of Ravaliér to be detained in a PICOS 'black site' for tortuous interrogation and brutal information-extraction whilst being subjected to a battery of physical and pharmacological torture. Both would be summarily executed on 4 September 2000 once PICOS had determined that all useful information that could be extracted from both subjects had been obtained. The Magnificus Dominus would announce the capture of Languet and Clairvaux to the Purgation press on the early morning of 1 August 2000, and the PNL-friendly right-wing press would immediately put out celebratory reports and op-eds jubilantly proclaiming that the 'seditious traitors and terrorists' who have 'conspired to destroy this nation for over a decade' have 'finally been rooted out from the rat's nest in which these cowards have been hiding-out for years', whilst proclaiming their seizures by PAF soldiers as a 'great and glorious victory for our Royaume!'

The Purgation invasions in the First Cleansing War of 2000-2002 would attract swift and immediate condemnation from the international community at large, and Purgatio's neighbours in particular. The other border nations of the Cholmondeley Commonwealth, People's Republic of Lascelles (formerly the Principality of Lascelles until 1985), Free Republic of Arenberg (formerly the Grand Duchy of Arenberg until 1989), and Kingdom of Esterházy would issue a joint statement on 29 July 2000 condemning the Purgation invasions as a 'barbaric and violent suppression of the sovereignty, independence, and self-determination of the peoples of Boisschot, Koháry, and Stratford', while vowing that their own peoples would 'fight tooth and nail to resist any similar attempts by the vile PNL dictatorship of Purgatio to impose their tyranny and despotism through brutish conquest and savage subjugation in denial of our own self-rule and self-determination and our people's basic right to self-governance and independence'.

The governments of the Animirian Federation and People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia would both issue separate condemnations of the Purgation offensive on 30 July and 31 July 2000 respectively, with the Animirian President threatening that it would 'employ all lawful and defensive means to counteract the naked militant aggression of the Purgation fascists and the despotic PNL regime', and the Stulitian Premier promising to 'respond in due kind to the barbarous violence of the PNL counter-revolutionaries and put down the forces of reaction in Purgatio which must not be allowed to spread across and consume this continent'. It would, however, take some time for the Animirian and Stulitian forces to respond to the Purgation offensive, with the Animirian government declaring war on Purgatio on 20 September 2000 and the Stulitian government following suit on 25 September 2000, before sending their forces over their borders and into the neighbouring Districts of Montoire and Le Tellier respectively.

The reason for the delayed military response of both nations was that the Animirian and Stulitian governments had also been engaged in their own ongoing war since the early 1970s, involving on-and-off border skirmishes and proxy conflicts, motivated by a combination of ideological differences, strategic security considerations, and a mutual competition for rival diplomatic influence across the continent of Villalmeyda, ever since the Stulitian nation fell to a communist revolution in 1965 and became the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia, prompting a wave of anti-communist fear and anxiety in the general populace of the liberal capitalist Animirian Federation, which culminated in a territorial conflict in 1971 when Animirian forces launched a pre-emptive incursion over the Animirian-Stulitian border that ended in a ceasefire in 1974, but without any formal end to the war. Conflict would intermittently flare up and die down between the two nations' frontline forces at the border for the next few decades, and at the outset of the First Cleansing War of 2000-2002, the Animirian and Stulitian forces had been engaged in frontline fighting along their border since 10 May 1998. A mutual ceasefire had to be negotiated between the two sides on 17 September 2000, before the two nations could re-direct their forces from the Animirian-Stulitian border to their respective borders with Purgatio instead. Once the invasion was launched, both countries made rapid gains into Purgation territory, overtaking vast swathes of land by the end of November 2000, with over 500 'liquidation facilities' falling under the control of Animirian or Stulitian forces and liberating more than 3.5 million Dysfonctionnel prisoners condemned to 'liquidation through labour' at that time, most of whom would flee into the heart of Animirian or Stulitian territory for refuge, but with more than 600,000 men and women of fighting age volunteering to fight for the Animirian or Stulitian armies to aid their efforts to push further into Purgation territory.

By 9 December 2000, the provincial capital city of Provence would be under siege at the hands of the Animirian army, while the provincial capital city of Pétrus had been surrounded by the Stulitian forces and sustained heavy artillery bombardment at the hands of the Stulitian People's Army. It was only when PAF reinforcements arrived to relieve the Siege of Provence on 14 December 2000 that the Animirians were forced to retreat from Provence. PAF Marine paratroopers would be air-dropped over Stulitian forces on the outskirts of Pétrus on 16 December 2000, performing a diversionary raid before PAF tank and armoured divisions could arrive on 18 December 2000 to relieve the city of Pétrus and push the Stulitian forces away from the provincial capital. By 17 February 2001, with more and more Purgation reinforcements having arrived in the Districts of Le Tellier and Montoire, the PAF would finally push the Stulitians and Animirians back to the original Purgation-Animirian and Purgation-Stulitian borders, with PAF infantry battalions even seizing control of the then-inhabited border territory of Charenne-du-Sud from the Animirians by 27 February 2001, which had been lost to the Animirian Empire all the way back in the aftermath of the Third Animirian-Purgation War of 1809-1811. The war slowed to a stalemate of attrition warfare, with intermittent fighting between the belligerents' frontline forces at their respective borders, until a formal armistice would be agreed between the three nations on 2 March 2002, formally ending the First Cleansing War of 2000-2002. Over 1.3 million PAF soldiers were involved in the fighting, and the offensive by the Purgations to push back the Animirian and Stulitian invaders, which had pushed deep into the Purgation heartland, would prove to be a costly one that would see the PAF sustain more than an estimated 105,000 military deaths with nearly $80 billion Élites being expended by the Purgation Treasury on financing the materiel and logistical costs of the war. The Animirians and Stulitians, having managed to surprise the PAF and catch the Purgations off-guard in the initial stages of their joint invasion, would suffer relatively minor losses in return, with the Animirians committing around 380,000 forces and suffering just over 31,000 military dead and the Stulitians committing around 570,000 regular forces for their invasion and sustaining slightly under 42,000 military deaths in turn.

The Purgations, however, would nevertheless retain their hold on the border territory of Charenne-du-Sud whilst maintaining their military occupation of the former nations of Stratford, Koháry, and Boisschot. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the PNL government would declare the war to be a 'clear victory' by the PAF to the Purgation press, touting the seizure of Charenne-du-Sud as a clear sign of the 'revival, re-birth, and rejuvenation of the greatness of the Purgation realm and the revitalisation of our people's strength and unity', appealing to nationalist revanchist sentiments on the ultra-nationalist 'far right' of the PNL party and the Purgation populace as a whole. In the following years, the Purgation government would work to retain and cement their control over the new occupied territories, with the Magnificus Dominus issuing an Executive Order (EO) on 8 March 2002 appointing three new 'Governors' or Chefs des Zones over the new Occupied Territories of Stratford, Koháry, and Boisschot. In addition to conducting sweeps of the border regions and city-by-city searches for GEM fighters and other Dysfonctionnel runaways and hideouts, the Purgation government also made efforts to incorporate the respective local populations into the ongoing genocide of the Dysfonctionnel in the Purgation heartland by inputting the genetic data of the conquered populations into the Auspex Operandi, classifying the locals into the twin categories of the Génétiquement Sain and the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, and erecting 'liquidation facilities' for the extermination of the newly identified Dysfonctionnel within the three former nations, to be imprisoned and subjected to 'liquidation through labour', just as the Purgation Dysfonctionnel were already being subjected to the same.

The Purgation Governors maintained control over the conquered territories through a combination of terror, division, and collusion. While PICOS forces and Purification Order paramilitaries did assist in applying blunt force terror tactics to root out and punish nationalist or pro-independence sedition within the conquered territories, more importantly and effectively, the Purgation control of the conquered territories was maintained through collaboration with local elites. The ruling classes which had governed Boisschot, Koháry, and Stratford prior to the Purgation invasions were permitted to retain their former positions of wealth and privilege over the local populations, and the new Governors often collaborated and colluded with local elites to cement the ongoing Purgation occupation. This was possible precisely because the border nations had been suffering from very similar social instabilities and political divisions that had beset Purgation society prior to the rise of Purgation fascism and the PNL's seizure of power in the coup d'état of 1987-1988 - the rise of organised crime, crises of stagflation and economic collapse from the Great Recession which had afflicted the global economy as a whole, the growth in left-wing politics and socialist, Marxist-Leninist insurgency and insurrection threatening the traditional hold on power that the ruling classes and wealthy business elites enjoyed in these three nations, and an overall decline in social stability and rise in political violence between far-left communist and far-right reactionary militant forces. The Purgation occupation, and its segregation of the populace into the Sain and Dysfonctionnel, coupled with its use of draconian terror and arbitrary violence to put down criminality, sedition, and insurrection, actually strengthened the local ruling classes' hold on power by destroying local trade unionist and Communist agitation whilst riling-up conservative and reactionary segments of the population with the promise of a fresh new crusade against the Dysfonctionnel within their own local communities, with an eye towards restoring 'law and order' and social harmony after decades of these nations being engulfed in similar bouts of social strife and political violence as had also afflicted Purgation society in the 1980s and before. These common interests and enemies thereby facilitated cooperation and collusion between the Purgation occupying forces and local elites, including indigenous fascist groups, traditional conservatives, and the former governments of these nations, dividing the local community and assisting the Purgation occupiers in maintaining their control over the Occupied Territories.

The Second Cleansing War of 2006-2009 or La Deuxième Guerre de Nettoyage Génétique would begin in earnest on 7 August 2006, with a surprise PAF invasion of the remaining border nations which had not been invaded in the prior war, namely, the Cholmondeley Commonwealth, the Free Republic of Arenberg, the People's Republic of Lascelles, and the Kingdom of Esterházy. The invasions would begin with a pre-emptive strike by the Purgation military, with the Air Force of the Royaume du Nettoyage (AFRN) launching a surprise bombing campaign of all major airports, naval bases, and military garrisons in the invaded nations, coupled with a simultaneous amphibious assault on their coastal cities by the Purgation Royal Navy (PRN) in conjunction with PAF commandos and marines. As the targeted nations were of a similar size as the occupied former nations of Boisschot, Koháry, and Stratford - i.e., each having a population of less than 100 million and a land area of about 12-15,000 km² each - the four nations' territories were completely overrun by PAF mobile infantry regiments by the close of October 2006.

The surprise invasion on the Purgation side would be triggered by a combination of the rise in nationalistic and revanchist sentiments within the Purgation 'far right' and especially the right-wing, ultra-nationalist wing of the PNL party, with movements like Ça Suffit! and the PNL-friendly Purgation right-wing media stoking nationalistic sentiments since the end of the First Cleansing War, fuelled by revanchist rhetoric of triggering and reinvigorating a promised 'national revival' of the old halcyon 'glory days' of historical Purgation imperialism by seizing back various 'lost territories' on the Purgation-Animirian and Purgation-Stulitian borders (as annexed from Purgatio back in the early 1800s) or re-establishing Purgatio's 'old empire' in the form of the RTCV's former colonial dominions. This, coupled with the continuing media demonisation of the Dysfonctionnel as an existential threat to Purgation internal security and social harmony emanating from both within Purgatio's borders and without, as had been ongoing in the Purgation far-right tabloid press since before the onset of the First Cleansing War, as well as the economic incentive favouring an invasion of the remaining border nations in order to gain access to greater numbers of slave labourers in the form of the persons that would be classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel within the soon-to-be-conquered local populations, motivated the various members of the moderate and extremist factions of the EDP to speak out in support of a second round of invasions at the EDP meeting of 23 June 2006, prompting the Magnificus Dominus to sign an Executive Order (EO) on 24 June 2006 ordering the PAF, AFRN, and PRN to plan for a pre-emptive strike and upcoming invasion of the remaining nations of Cholmondeley, Arenberg, Esterházy, and Lascelles.

War would also break out between Purgatio and her Animirian and Stulitian neighbours; however, this time, the PAF would not be caught off-guard by a surprise Animirian and Stulitian invasion, with Purgatio's southern and eastern borders being heavily fortified with over 500,000 PAF regular forces at the frontlines following the armistice of 2 March 2002, which had not formally ended the legal state of war as previously declared between Purgatio on the one hand, and the Animirian Federation and People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia on the other. Another difference between the First and Second Cleansing Wars, however, is that the Animirian and Stulitian forces would not launch any invasions into the Purgation heartland as before, with most of the fighting consisting of the PAF launching small-scale border incursions into Animirian and Stulitian territories before being repelled by the respective national military forces at the frontlines. The main reason for this is that, unlike in the First Cleansing War, the Animirian and Stulitian governments would not negotiate any alliance or agreement between them to cooperate in any joint or cooperative invasion of Purgatio. The border skirmishes between Animirian and Stulitian forces would escalate once more when the Stulitian People's Army launched a number of minor incursions over the border and into Animirian territory on 5-9 November 2005, resulting in renewed hostilities between the two sides which persisted until the beginning of the Second Cleansing War on 7 August 2006. As such, rather than the Animirians and Stulitians being united in a joint alliance against the Purgations, the Second Cleansing War would feature a three-way war between Purgatio, Animiria, and Stulitia, all engaged in an ongoing war with one another. As the Animirian and Stulitian forces had to now split their energies and resources between defending against Purgation incursions, on the one hand, and the ongoing fighting flaring up on the Animirian-Stulitian border, on the other, the Second Cleansing War would see much greater Purgation success than in the First Cleansing War. By 19 December 2006, PAF forces would seize and occupy the border region of Meurthe which had been annexed by the Kingdom of Stulitia back in the aftermath of the Second Purgation-Stulitian War of 1798-1799. On 8 February 2007, PAF paratroopers and armoured infantry battalions would seize and occupy the border region of Lilian-en-Alagnon, which had likewise been ceded to the Animirian Empire following the defeat of the old Holy Kingdom of Purgatio in the Third Animirian-Purgation War of 1809-1811. Fighting between the PAF and the Animirian and Stulitian armed forces would gradually fade and die down in the subsequent months and years, and the Second Cleansing War would end not with a formal ceasefire or armistice of any kind, but through a de facto end to military hostilities when the three nations' militaries simply ceased to launch further offensive attacks on each other from 26-28 February 2009, thereby bringing the Second Cleansing War of 2006-2009 to a practical, de facto end, but with Purgatio remaining in a formal state of war with the Animirian Federation and the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia.

The Second Cleansing War of 2006-2009 would prove to be a costly endeavour for all belligerents involved, with the regular armed forces of Purgatio, Animiria, and Stulitia sustaining military deaths in excess of 160,000 soldiers each. The conquest of the new Occupied Territories of Cholmondeley, Arenberg, Esterházy, and Lascelles, however, coupled with the successful PAF seizure and annexation of the former 'lost territories' of Lilian-en-Alagnon from Animiria and Meurthe from Stulitia, would nonetheless provide effective ammunition for the PNL government to win a propaganda victory at home by once again declaring the Second Cleansing War to have been a 'great victory for our Royaume' to the right-wing Purgation press, sold and marketed as proof of the 'national revival and rejuvenation of the Purgation realm', with the return of previously ceded border regions appealing to revanchist and ultra-nationalist sentiments in the country, and with the conquest of the new Occupied Territories being framed and presented in PNL-friendly media outlets as the beginning of a great purge of ever more Dysfonctionnel elements formerly harboured within Purgatio's neighbours, thereby preventing such Dysfonctionnel persons from further undermining Purgation security and harmony through crime, disorder, and insurgency, crossing the border into Purgation territory to threaten the safety and prosperity of the Purgation people. The Magnificus Dominus would sign yet another Executive Order (EO) on 1 March 2009 appointing four new 'Governors' or Chefs des Zones to administer the Occupied Territories of Lascelles, Esterházy, Cholmondeley, and Arenberg, employing the same 'divide and conquer' strategy as the other three Governors of Koháry, Stratford, and Boisschot, one of collaborating and colluding with local elites and working in conjunction with the pre-existing ruling classes to cement their control over the conquered populations.

In particular, in respect of the former Free Republic of Arenberg (in which the monarchist and traditionalist Grand Duchy of Arenberg had recently fallen to an escalating series of rural peasant rebellions led by a loose coalition of agrarian socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, libertarian socialists, urban Marxist-Leninist communists, a myriad of anarchist groups, liberal constitutionalist and socially democratic forces, and various pro-peasantry, pro-'land reforms' rural militias in the 1989 Arenberg Revolution) and the former People's Republic of Lascelles (in which the conservative and capitalistic Principality of Lascelles had likewise fallen to a successful Marxist-Leninist urban socialist revolution of labour unions and the industrial working-class in the Red December Uprising of 1985), the Purgation occupying administrations dispossessed and persecuted the local post-revolutionary governments and re-installed the former traditionalist pre-revolution elites of both Arenberg and Lascelles respectively, enabling the Purgation Governors to collaborate and form alliances with former anti-government forces in both nations, including monarchist factions, former aristocrats, former landed gentry and mercantile elites, former business elites, all their various culturally conservative counter-revolutionary allies, and other local fascist reactionaries and traditionalist conservative groups, to work together to purge and persecute their common enemies and once again divide the local populace so as to assist the Purgation occupiers in cementing their hold over the new Occupied Territories. For the Occupied Territories of Cholmondeley and Esterházy, the Purgation Governors and PICOS and Purification Order paramilitaries assisted pre-existing local elites and already established ruling classes in purging and violently suppressing insurgent or revolutionary elements of the indigenous population which had already been threatening the local governments' hold on power prior to the Purgation annexations, including communist terrorists, left-wing guerrillas, and other socialistic insurrectionist groups. These 'divide and conquer' tactics further enabled the Purgation occupiers to maintain their control over the conquered peoples of the Occupied Territories, whose populations were likewise integrated into the Auspex Operandi DNA database, with the residents being divided into the Sain and the Dysfonctionnel in order to single-out the latter for extermination via 'liquidation through labour'.

To date, although the Purgation State remains in an official state of war with her Animirian and Stulitian neighbours, with the occasional border skirmish breaking out between frontline forces stationed along the heavily guarded, heavily militarised border, the scale of such fighting between the three nations' regular armed forces has never flared up or escalated to the same degree of intensity as that which occurred in the First and Second Cleansing Wars. The seven Occupied Territories remain a formally annexed part of the Purgation State and remain under the de facto control and occupation of the PNL government, ruled by the appointed Chefs des Zones in conjunction with various local administrations and allied puppet governments, although the Purgation State's legal claims to the territories of the conquered former nations have never been recognised by the international community as a whole, with most foreign governments remaining of the legal view that the Purgation annexations and continuing military occupations remain illegal and in violation of the sovereignty and self-determination of the conquered populations. The Animirian and Stulitian governments would also continue to remain in a de jure state of war with one another as well, with occasional border skirmishes likewise flaring up along the over 4,600 km-long Animirian-Stulitian border intermittently, and with the two nations subsequently engaging in various proxy conflicts in other neighbouring nations situated on the wider continent of Villalmeyda, such as the Visserien Border Conflict of 2011-2014 between the capitalist Visserien Vrijstaat (supported by the Animirian government with military assistance, expertise, and training) and the communist Visserien Volksrepubliek (likewise supported by the Stulitian government with similar military and materiel and logistical aid throughout the conflict), and the subsequent attempted invasion of the capitalist Freie Stadt Schwelitz (supported by the Animirian government) by the Visserien Volksrepubliek (sponsored with materiel aid, weapons, and military advisers from the Stulitian People's Army) in 2016-2019, both of which ended in stalemates and states of status quo ante bellum. The ongoing hostilities and various such proxy conflicts between the Animirian and Stulitian governments would all but guarantee that both nations would find themselves unable to form another military alliance to launch any joint offensive or cooperative military venture against Purgatio with their combined forces. Both the Animirian and Stulitian governments would continue channelling their economic and military assistance to the GEM insurgents operating within the Purgation State's territory, with the PNL government retaliating in kind with similar economic and military assistance to fascist and reactionary anti-government opposition groups in both nations, including the neo-Nazi ultra-nationalistic Imperial Unity Front (IUF) in the Animirian Federation and the counter-revolutionary anti-communist National Alliance for Stulitian Freedom (NASF) in the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia.

Hence, the status quo state of affairs remains a de jure ongoing three-way war between Purgatio, Animiria, and Stulitia, with all three nations remaining in a formally declared state of war with one another, but de facto there is very little actual military conflict or fighting taking place between their respective armies at their borders on a day-to-day basis, save only for the occasional small-scale and relatively minor border conflicts flaring up and dying down intermittently between the three neighbours from time to time, or the proxy indirect fighting of all three nations also having to contend with an ongoing insurgency and civil war against their own domestic militant groups that are armed and sponsored in part by their neighbours (viz., PNL Purgatio against the GEM; Animiria against the IUF as well as the Animirian Communist Party (ACP), funded and supported by the Stulitian government; and Stulitia against the NASF, sponsored by both PNL Purgatio and the Animirian government), but with such internal fighting similarly flaring up and dying down intermittently now and again.

by **Purgatio** » Mon Aug 21, 2023 11:20 pm

Recent Internal Developments and Social Problems in the Purgation State (2009-)

On 10 November 2009, the Director of the Purgation Institute of Genetic Cleanliness (PIGC), Marin de la Trémouille, announced the promulgation of a new genetic manipulation and human genetic engineering programme entitled Les Enfants du Ciel (or literally 'The Children of Heaven'), enacted in PIGC Order No. 457 of 2009. The stated intent of Les Enfants du Ciel was to use 'genetic editing techniques' to create a 'new generation of the best and the brightest of our people', who would be best placed, biologically and genetically, to 'take our Royaume onward to ever greater and ever more glorious new heights'. The PIGC would issue press releases and public statements intended to 'educate' and 'inform' the public on the collective benefits of the new Les Enfants du Ciel programme, which the PIGC claimed was premised on the same statistical modelling used to produce the Auspex Operandi system and its algorithmic classification of persons into the Génétiquement Sain and Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel - namely, that by using forensic epidemiology to compare the genetic data of two classes of society, the PIGC could identify alleles more or less likely to be in persons who were unusually intelligent, healthy, law-abiding, disciplined and self-controlling, and socially and economically productive, selecting for those positive traits and then modifying the genome of a zygote using targeted genome editing techniques to that effect. Whilst the accuracy of this claim has been hotly contested by the wider scientific community outside Purgatio's borders, within Purgatio the PIGC pushed the dominant narrative through government-friendly media outlets that the time had come to create a 'new generation of the über-talented and the hyper-intelligent to lead and guide our people into our pre-destined future'. In the words of the PIGC Director himself in an interview on L'Agence National on 19 November 2009, 'having used our technology to find the Dysfonctionnel, those biologically prone to parasitism, to target them for appropriate treatment, the time has come to do the opposite, to find the elect, the brightest, the fittest, most capable and able of our citizenry, those naturally prone to productivity instead'.

The programme, however, would not be open to all, and the PIGC's given justification would be that of expense - namely, that it cost significant amounts of resources to edit the genome of a zygote and implant multiple edited zygotes in an artificial uterus to be incubated and birthed through artificial fertilisation and birth, and therefore the numbers of children born through the programme would have to be limited. In any event, since Les Enfants du Ciel was intended to cultivate an elite select few children to form the 'future leaders' of Purgatio, it would have been counter-productive for the programme to be made available for mass consumption. Instead, prospective parents would apply to the PIGC through a theoretically open process to be pre-'selected' for eligibility to have their foetus be artificially conceived through in-vitro fertilisation and subsequent zygote genome editing to create an ostensibly genetically superior offspring. The purported criteria for selection would be the 'genetic quality' of the applicant parents, based on 'phenotypical expression' of the desirable traits, such as health, intelligence, productivity, impulse-control, civic consciousness, and so on, traits which were said to be the inverse of the undesirable traits of the Dysfonctionnel. Given the inherent subjectivity of the assessment criteria, however, it was perhaps unsurprising that the families which ended up being pre-'selected' for eligibility under the Les Enfants du Ciel programme would end up being the wealthiest, most well-connected aristocratic families in Purgatio.

The PIGC's public statements would, of course, explain away the disproportionate over-representation of Purgatio's most privileged and powerful households in its programme as a natural result of a meritocratic selection process. Such families had 'prestigious bloodlines' and 'esteemed lineages', the applicant parents were generally extremely successful in their own right, often held high-ranking positions within business, academia, research, law, politics, civil service, the prestigious professional services and bodies, media, arts and high culture, and other spheres of public and civic life, and could provide genealogical or historical records showing that their ancestors and forebears lived similarly successful, honourable, and prestigious lives. Thus, the PIGC would suggest that the fact that such prestigious, powerful, and wealthy families were selected for its Les Enfants du Ciel project was actually a vindication of the neutral, objective, and meritocratic nature of its selection process, which was concerned only with the quality of the bloodline, lineage, and pedigree of the applicant parents and that of their would-be offspring, and nothing else. Far from demonstrating the biased nature of the selection process, it was said to be proof of how unbiased the programme was.

By the close of December 2009, the PIGC had received and processed tens of millions of applications from across the country, yet only 587 families would be selected in the end. Colloquially, these elite 587 households are often referred to as Les Maisons du Ciel (or an individual household may be casually referred to as 'une famille du ciel'), with such phrases sometimes being used in a complimentary fashion, sometimes in a pejorative manner, depending on the speaker. Many of the elite families within the PNL government would be amongst the selected 587 households - these included, of course, the De La Fayette household (of the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette), the De Lussan household (of the Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan), the De Givenchy household (of the Defence Secretary Juste-Charles de Givenchy), the De Corday household (of the Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday), and the De Laval household (of the Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval), amongst others. The PIGC Register of the families of Les Enfants du Ciel would form a de facto informal directory of the top brass of Purgation 'high society', functioning as an effective social register or a 'who's who' list of the most well-connected, prestigious 'old money' aristocratic families within the nation, with the most esteemed and glamorous of family lineages, ancestries, and social reputations.

The very first 'batch' of forty-six infants conceived under Les Enfants du Ciel would be birthed (or 'decanted') on 1 August 2010, and would include amongst their members Isidore de la Falaise (born to the younger brother of the deceased Xavier de la Falaise, namely, Louis-Marie de la Falaise), Jaufré de Sablé (born to the wealthy heir to the right-wing De Sablé media empire, Jean-Claude de Sablé), Savine de Valentinois (born to the wealthy heir to the De Valentinois banking empire, Vincent de Valentinois), and Diane du Raj de la Pierre (daughter of the Lady President of the Supreme Court, Clothilde d'Hénin-Liétard d'Alsace and a prominent commercial barrister descended from a long line of prestigious members of the Purgation Bar dating back centuries, Jacques-Laurent du Raj de la Pierre, A.C.). Whilst no formal law, decree, or edict would ever be promulgated to confer any legal advantages or official privileges upon a child born under this Les Enfants du Ciel scheme as compared to any other child conceived through the ordinary biological route, nevertheless, the PIGC's messaging and awareness campaigns would create a powerful and indelible cultural association between the offspring of a Les Enfants du Ciel family and such enviable community notions of 'genetical and biological superiority' and 'contributive social productivity' more generally, cultivating a strong impression amongst many in society that for one to be born into a Les Enfants du Ciel household was to be more naturally and biologically inclined, innately and inherently, towards being an unusually productive member of the community who would contribute beneficially and positively towards the general welfare and well-being of the Purgation national community more broadly.

On 14 May 2010, the Media and Culture Secretary, Marquisa de Taillefer, and the Education Secretary, Urbain Robillard, would propose at an EDP meeting that Mandatum Est - a non-theistic religious or philosophical belief system centred around the tenets and values promoted in the book La Solution Finale published in 1976 by Geneviève Aumont (as she was then called) - ought to be made the new official State religion of the Purgation State, to signify the country's reincarnation and revitalisation achieved through a radical shift in the nation's culture and way of life. Prior to this point, great strides had already been made to promote the philosophical ideals and beliefs within Mandatum Est. Many of the PNL-friendly right-wing media outlets had already been putting out positive media coverage about the contents of La Solution Finale since the 1990s, Purgation public schools already taught children the benefits of eugenics, the dangers of dysgenics, and other such ideas contained within La Solution Finale as part of the government's 'Genetic Integrity Education' programme, the PNL party (membership of which was a mandatory pre-requisite to hold any position of public authority) already included classes propagating the contents and teachings of Mandatum Est and La Solution Finale as part of its ideological training programme, and of course Mandatum Est had already become an incredibly popular work and the de facto treatise and manifesto of 'far right' movements in Purgatio, including and especially the Ça Suffit! movement and the most ideologically radical of the PIGC scientists and researchers, PICOS officers and troopers, and Purification Order paramilitary soldiers. Nevertheless, Media and Culture Secretary Marquisa and Education Secretary Robillard wished for the change to be made official, such that the government could begin more aggressively promoting the religion amongst the Purgation populace, and actively encouraging (without outright coercion or criminal compulsion) more and more Purgations to either convert or at least accept and embrace its teachings and doctrines.

As expected, the High Inquisitor of PICOS, Geneviève de la Fayette, being the de facto founder of the new religion or philosophical belief system, was enthusiastically supportive of the idea, as was the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet, who had not founded the doctrine itself but had become a major adherent to, and long-time proponent of, the ideology and its tenets. Not all members of the EDP, however, were ecstatic about the idea, with some like Premier Jeanne-Emmanuelle, Defence Secretary Juste-Charles, Commerce Secretary Kalle Delcroix, PPF Commissioner Audric, and PAF Chief of Defence Staff Orvelle all expressing concerns about alienating the more conservative and traditionalist Catholic segments of the Purgation populace, which had also made up a core segment of the PNL party's broader support base alongside the more ideologically radical fascistic and pro-eugenic activists who had embraced the new Mandatum Est belief system.

Eventually, however, the Magnificus Dominus did agree to sign and promulgate Executive Order (EO) No. 127 of 2010 on 16 May 2010, which did make the new Mandatum Est faith, centred around the writings of Geneviève Aumont in La Solution Finale, the official State religion of the country, as a symbolic gesture to signal the nation's break with her past and her embrace of a more eugenic and socially Darwinistic worldview. As the official State religion, the Mandatum Est faith would be the governing philosophy of the PNL party and of all public bodies and institutions, it would form the core philosophical foundation of various governmental programmes, providing the underlying rationale and justification for ongoing public works such as the 'liquidation through labour' of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, the genetic engineering of Les Enfants du Ciel, and the maintenance of the Auspex Operandi national DNA database, amongst others. The religion would also become institutionalised, with the Media and Culture Ministry being empowered to erect temples, create libraries and archives, and host religious ceremonies professing and propagating the tenets of the faith in order to encourage more persons to conscientiously adhere to and enthusiastically embrace its ideals of the promotion of eugenics, the arresting of dysgenic decline, the paramountcy of ‘natural selection’, biological competition, and the ‘survival of the fittest’, and the use of artificial 'genetic selection' techniques to compensate for the taming of natural selective forces in a civilised society and to perfect and refine the overall genetic quality of the 'body national' or 'national organism', to select for more socially productive and fruitful qualities and weed-out or limit the influence of disordered and parasitical characteristics injurious to the health of the national people's community.

However, EO 127/2010 also clarified that the Mandatum Est faith would not be imposed upon the Purgation populace, that professing the faith would not be made mandatory, and it included a clause which expressly provided in its text that the "religious freedoms of the Purgation Catholic community to believe, worship, profess, and partake in their faith shall not be prejudiced by the present Order", with the provision being carefully and deliberately worded to only protect the religious freedom of the Catholic faith, which was still being professed by just slightly over half of the country at the time, with many conservative-minded and traditionalist or reactionary elements of the Catholic community having supported the rise of the PNL party in the past. The insertion of that clause was entirely a politically motivated decision to reassure conservative Catholic supporters of the PNL that their religious freedoms would not be compromised so as to avoid alienating them from the present government. The EDP and the Magnificus Dominus had no intention to extend the same express textual protections for other minority faiths within the country, whose support the PNL did not depend upon, and many of which were perceived in a rather complicated and conflicted fashion by the more conservative and religiously prejudiced segments of the PNL's reactionary support base - for example, many of the more conservative Catholics and the more radical of the Mandatum Est followers subscribed to the implicit cultural association of Judaism with communism and socialism (given the alleged or oft-assumed over-representation of Purgation Jews within the Communist Party of Purgatio and L'Épée du Peuple organisations), or the association of Islam with either Islamist fundamentalist terrorism or the spate of 'Asian grooming gangs' in the 1970s and 1980s involving disproportionately Bangladeshi or Pakistani perpetrators, or the association of Protestant Christianity with historical aggression and animosity from the traditionally Protestant Animirian Empire and Kingdom of Stulitia, and so on. None of these religious minorities would be outwardly or outrightly persecuted by the PNL Purgation government; however, the glaring absence of legal protections of their religious freedoms and rights to worship, whilst granting the same protections to the Purgation Catholic community, was clearly intended to appease and mollify that community by according them a special, privileged status encoded in law, and was especially intended to reassure the more traditionalist conservative and religiously prejudiced members of that community that any religiously motivated attempts on their part to suppress the worship of religious minorities, discriminate against them for their faith, or otherwise gradually exclude them from spheres of public life would certainly not be opposed by the new PNL government or made illegal or outlawed in any way.

In other words, EO 127/2010 represented a strange mix of traditionalism and radical change, it signalled an embrace of a new, non-theistic, materialistic, scientifically coded ideology and belief system which was credited by the PNL with contributing to Purgatio's recent national reincarnation and revival, whilst still appeasing traditional conservative Catholic supporters with promises of the protection of their faith and even according them a privileged position in law as compared to other religious minority communities at the time, amounting to an amalgamated political compromise which attempted to marry the competing positions of the PNL's traditionalist conservative base against its more ideologically radical supporters who championed militant and revolutionary changes to the socio-cultural landscape of the country for the betterment of Purgatio's future. It would be followed up with a royal edict signed and issued by Le Grand Roi de la Purgatio on 17 May 2010 which formally clarified that the absolute monarch, Le Grand Roi, would be the head and leader of the institutionalised Mandatum Est faith. On 19 May 2010, the Media and Culture Ministry would also issue an internal policy circular creating a list of works and publications intended to provide greater structure and clarity as to the tenets and beliefs of the Mandatum Est religion, which included not only Geneviève Aumont's famous La Solution Finale treatise, but also much older and earlier pro-eugenic historical works from academics and intellectuals who had openly flirted with eugenical and genetically discriminatory ideas during Purgatio's age of liberal republican constitutionalism, including L'Évolution et la Dévolution de l'Espèce Humaine authored by the aristocratic dilettante and amateur philosopher Claude de Monchy in 1886, Les maladies d'origine dysplasique by prestigious medical practitioner and physician Aimé-Joseph Agren in 1927, L'Histoire Naturelle: le Mélangé et la Dégénérescence des Peuples by evolutionary biologist and geneticist Georges de Narbonne in 1942, and The Great Making and Unmaking of Mankind: An Urgent Warning by molecular biologist Guy Azaïs Tréhot in 1958, amongst many others. The purpose behind the highlighting of these additional older works was to propagate the notion that such ideals of eugenics, the avoidance of dysgenics, social Darwinism and the 'survival of the fittest', and the need for artificial genetic selection by State policy, were not new or recent inventions but deeply rooted and historical aspects of Purgation culture which had merely undergone a recent revival or resurgence of interest.

By the close of January 2011, the door-to-door 'round-ups' of the Dysfonctionnel or random sweeps of cities and townships or 'stops and searches' in the streets and public spaces to locate more Dysfonctionnel persons had begun to decline, and the Home Office would produce a report indicating that the numbers of Dysfonctionnel prisoners in PICOS 'liquidation facilities' across the country had begun to stabilise, with the number of detainees being subjected to ongoing 'liquidation through labour' being estimated at 303.891 million, and with that number remaining relatively stable throughout the years of 2007-2011. In other words, the sharp spikes and increases in the numbers of seized and detained Dysfonctionnel which had been growing throughout the 1990s and early 2000s by virtue of numerous decrees and orders adopted by the EDP and various governmental organs in an effort to locate, detain, and preventively liquidate as many Dysfonctionnel persons across the country as they could find, had begun to wear-off as the numbers detained had slowly and gradually begun to plateau. Consequently, at the EDP meeting of 30 January 2011, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan indicated that it was now time for the government to implement a policy of normalising or regularising the process of genetic classification and re-classification. While the use of random 'stops and searches', door-to-door searches in major cities, 'search and destroy' operations, sweeps of whole cities and townships by PICOS and the Purification Order, may have been more time-efficient as a wartime measure to locate as many Dysfonctionnel as possible in the shortest period of time, the time had come to establish a formal process for the determination of future classifications of persons as Dysfonctionnel, not based upon their genome, but their so-called 'phenotypical expression' - in other words, their display or manifestation of so-called undesirable and/or parasitical traits and qualities which served to indicate that they were, in fact, Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel despite being presently classified as Génétiquement Sain by the Auspex Operandi. As a long-term measure, arbitrary searches and sweeping arrests by paramilitary or auxiliary groups were not an efficient, viable, or sustainable means of determining future classifications of persons as Sain or Dysfonctionnel based upon their ostensibly antisocial or deviant behaviours. A formal and official legal process or prevailing procedure ought to be created going forward to process large numbers of such cases across the country in a fair, accurate, and consistent fashion.

PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille agreed, and suggested that a new system of tribunals be created to determine all questions of a person's 'genetic classification' in future. Attorney-General Lucien Vannier initially disagreed, taking the view that the question of whether a person was a 'genetically healthy' or 'genetically disordered' individual ought to be regarded as a pure question of law, which the ordinary court system was well-equipped to determine as a matter of legal interpretation and construction. However, he was persuaded by the argument made by PIGC Director Marin and High Inquisitor Geneviève that this was arguably a 'mixed question of law, policy, and scientific expertise' requiring 'specialist expert determination', and it may be better for the matter to be determined by a 'mixed panel' or 'composite tribunal' consisting of jurists, Home Office civil servants, PIGC scientists, and PICOS officers, to determine all claims respecting whether a person ought to be classified as Génétiquement Sain or Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, in law, with all the serious implications and consequences that would follow from a successful re-classification - i.e., extermination via 'liquidation through labour' in a liquidation facility.

Given the critical importance that such determinations would hold over the individuals brought before such tribunals, the broad structure to be established was a matter of much debate and discussion amongst the members of the EDP. The eventual framework that was agreed upon was erected in Executive Order (EO) No. 26 of 2011 (sometimes referred to by historians and journalists as the "Special Tribunals Establishment Ordinance"), promulgated by the Magnificus Dominus on 8 February 2011, and may be broadly summarised as such - first, one of three stakeholders had to bring a legal complaint against an individual person on the grounds that they should be re-classified from Génétiquement Sain to Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, those stakeholders empowered with ius standi to bring such re-classification claims being PICOS, the PIGC, and the Home Office. The basis for a purported reclassification could be myriad, with the broad, overarching test being that the individual in question is "inherently and pathologically pre-disposed towards anti-social, deviant, and/or parasitical tendencies manifesting in behaviours detrimental to the health, vitality, and productivity of the wider national community and its well-being". That broad criteria was further particularised into a list of non-exhaustive traits and characteristics which were also left intentionally flexible and ill-defined to grant more flexibility to the intended arbiters, and followed largely the same categories used by the PIGC in its prior PIGC Order No. 86 of 1988 to determine which types of persons were to be classified as either 'genetically healthy' or 'genetically disordered' under the Auspex Operandi system - 'vandals', 'hooligans', 'delinquents', 'cripples', 'retards', 'vagrants', 'vagabonds', 'work-shy', 'moochers', 'leeches', 'insane', 'unsound', 'incontinent', 'addled', 'indolent', 'feeble-minded', 'imbecilic', and such other ambiguous classifications were utilised to provide interpretative guidance as to what traits, behaviours, or characteristics would be suggestive of a 'parasitical' disposition tending towards injuring and prejudicing the community as a whole.

Once one of the three 'stakeholders' filed a complaint, the Attorney-General and the Attorney-General's Office would examine the complaint and make a determination on whether to proceed with the re-classification action. In this process, all three 'stakeholders' would have a duty to form their own independent view on whether the person and their behaviour merited re-classification, and would have to provide their own perspective to the Attorney-General's Office (AGO), to assist the AGO in coming to a conclusion on the matter. If the AGO decided not to proceed with re-classification, the 'stakeholders' would have a right to file for judicial review of that determination before the ordinary courts of law. Unlike the case with usual exercises of 'administrative discretion', however, the courts of law would have a much broader jurisdiction to review the reasonableness, correctness, or the overall propriety and merits of a refusal by the AGO to proceed. If the AGO decided to proceed with the re-classification, then an AGO state counsel would appear before a tribunal, a parallel judicial process governed by a separate procedural regime. That tribunal would be referred to as Un Tribunal Extraordinaire pour la Conservation de l'Organisme National, often abbreviated as "TECON" for short, and would consist of a three-person panel constituted by way of separate appointments by the three 'stakeholders'. PICOS, PIGC, and the Home Office would hire 'specialist judges' and 'specialised legal counsel' who could be appointed to serve on a TECON tribunal with the experience and expertise to examine re-classification cases and determine and apply an ostensibly consistent, more elaborate criteria in individualised cases. The TECON tribunal would be directed to determine the case based on a 'preponderance of the evidence' standard, with the procedural rules following many of the standard conventions of either a civil trial or a private confidential arbitration proceeding. Hearings would be held in private and would not be open to the public, and while respondents would be permitted to be represented by counsel, free legal assistance would not be provided by way of public funding or taxpayer monies. TECON tribunal judges would have a broad discretion to determine how evidence would be received, including through affidavits, oral evidence, whether cross-examination would be permitted, what evidence to permit, and whether to rely on 'secret evidence' which could not be disclosed to the other side on grounds of confidentiality or national interest.

The question that the TECON tribunal would determine is not whether the respondent committed the underlying act of which he or she stands accused, but rather whether they may be said to possess a Dysfonctionnel orientation or tendency more broadly. In other words, it would be the respondent's character and disposition which was to be adjudged and not their actions per se, although invariably what actions they have or have not committed would usually constitute important evidence from which their broader orientation or tendency may be inferred. The TECON tribunal would have to reach a decision by majority and issue a full reasoned ground of its decision. Whichever side prevailed, be it the AGO state counsel seeking re-classification or the respondent who was resisting it, the losing party could appeal against that decision to another standing appellate body, Le Tribunal Extraordinaire de Cassation aux TECON, also known as "TECAT" for short. TECAT would function more as a standing judicial institution than an ad hoc arbitral tribunal, with permanent stipendiary judicial officers who would hear appeals and possess a broad jurisdiction to review the correctness and merits of the TECON decision rendered below. The purpose of the TECAT appeal system was, in theory, to ensure a broader or 'big picture' consistency in the criteria being employed to make important decisions respecting genetic classification. Once TECAT had rendered its decision, the ruling would not be appealable in law; however, it could be reviewed before the ordinary courts of law, more specifically with a 'petition for review' submitted to the Supreme Court of Cassation, which would first have to grant leave or permission for the review, based on whether any adequate 'grounds for review' had been pleaded in the petition, and if so, they would grant leave and the review application would be heard on the merits. The Supreme Court of Cassation would not review the substantive correctness of the TECAT decision that was being appealed against, but only consider questions of law and whether legal errors had been made, in terms of the interpretation and construction of either the empowering legislation, EO 26/2011, or the TECON or TECAT procedural rules, which held the status of subsidiary legislation promulgated under EO 26/2011. The intention behind EO 26/2011 was therefore to provide a more formalised and regularised process for the determination of such important questions of whether a person should be re-classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel and sent for extermination in a 'liquidation facility', making the TECON-TECAT tribunal system an extremely powerful and influential parallel judicial system which would wield immense authority and enjoy enormous discretion within the Purgation State's legal system.

And the EDP would soon also come to render yet another pivotal decision in response to the Home Office's January 2011 report on the stabilisation of the numbers of Dysfonctionnel prisoners entering the 'liquidation facilities' in the past few years, namely to engage in the mass privatisation of the PNL's genocidal exterminatory project and to outsource large segments and sectors of the government's 'liquidation through labour' programme to the private sector and for-profit private companies, especially to large corporate conglomerates or family-owned, privately-held companies that were friendly and aligned with the fascistic PNL regime. The privatisation project was championed by many corporate partners and long-time contractors and suppliers of the PNL government who made their views known through the Commerce Ministry, with the Commerce Secretary Kalle Delcroix taking up the suggestion and proposing a massive privatisation drive at the EDP meeting of 17 March 2011, positively suggesting that that programme would help to create 'new business and investment opportunities to stimulate the local economy and create jobs' by allowing and 'empowering our private sector partners to tap into a vast untapped ocean of exploitable labour resource units presently fully under the control of this government', referring to the over 300 million Dysfonctionnel detainees being forced to work in concentration camps under the ongoing 'liquidation through labour' programme. He proposed an open tender or competitive bidding process in which companies would have the ability to bid for long-term 'concession contracts' in which a company would purchase the rights to exploit and profit from a 'liquidation facility' and the fruits of the Dysfonctionnel forced labourers thereat. With over 40,000 'liquidation facilities' having been established across the country by PICOS officers at this point in time, Commerce Secretary Kalle Delcroix took the view that the 'opportunities for profit are enormous' and that 'we must not let this opportunity go to waste to both bring in immense revenues for this government whilst providing a wealth of immensely profitable new business and commercial opportunities for entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, and many other job-creators across our country'.

Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval was enthusiastic about the proposal, taking the view that the new revenues brought in under the programme would allow the government to cut taxes and substitute large swathes of its present receipts for monthly payments under long-term concession contracts, and proposed that the government could boost its popularity amongst the public whilst stimulating the economy with sweeping across-the-board tax cuts, especially on capital, while simultaneously keeping a balanced budget to avoid the deep deficits of pre-PNL Purgatio. Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday was also supportive of the proposal, anxious as he was to present a 'friendlier face of this country to the world' which he hoped could be achieved by cultivating a positive business-friendly reputation for the country amongst foreign investors. Premier of the PNC Jeanne-Emmanuelle hoped that the proposal could strengthen the present relationship between the PNL government and big businesses to ensure that the present regime would continue to enjoy their support and assistance in remaining in power.

However, High Inquisitor of PICOS, Geneviève de la Fayette, was outraged and incensed by the suggestion, calling it 'deeply unpatriotic and borderline treasonous' to suggest 'selling-out a critical national security resource to for-profit private actors'. She took the view that the 'liquidation facilities' were a critical part of the government's internal security efforts, since the purpose at the end of the day was to liquidate disordered and dysfunctional elements of the community to protect the Purgation community from antisocial behaviour, and that 'for-profit actors' could not be trusted to 'bear the wider public interest in mind' once they were awarded these concession contracts. She also took the view that the proposal was a 'breach of faith and confidence' on the part of the Commerce Ministry, since in her view it violated the 'essential compromise' that the Dysfonctionnel would be more slowly exterminated through 'liquidation through labour' - as opposed to more time-efficient methods such as gassing or summary execution by firing squads - but only on the strict understanding that they would, eventually, be exterminated. She feared that leasing out the camps on concession contracts to private companies would only increase the risk of the detainees being retained as a long-term slave labour force as opposed to being 'liquidated in full'. Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet agreed, calling out the supporters of the proposal as 'whores prostituting this country out to capital' and denigrated them for 'asking us to spread our legs in such a supine position' as we 'bastardise and mutilate our internal security to make a handful of fat fucks even fatter still'.

Commerce Secretary Kalle Delcroix took offence at these suggestions, and the next day on 18 March 2011, he pointed out that his proposed privatisation programme was, in his view, not altogether different from what the PNL government had attempted in the past. After the PNL came to power in 1987-1988, he noted, the party pursued a 'mixed economic model', with the government intervening in the economy to direct a massive wartime rearmament and wartime materiel and armaments productions surge from 1988 onwards, in order to prepare the PAF military for its civil war against the eventual much-anticipated GEM insurgency campaign in Villehardouin and Lusignan, directing new public works projects whilst simultaneously reinforcing other aspects of the capitalist economy. In particular, he noted that from 1988 to 1995, the PNL government privatised huge swathes of the economy and numerous state-owned enterprises in a broad variety of industries - banks and financial services, oil and gas industries, steelworks and ironworks, welfare organisations, schools and hospitals, weather detection and flood management, certain emergency services, various mines and quarries, shipyards, quays and harbour management, waste management, railway lines, shipping lines, public utilities, public transportation, telecommunications industries, postal services, commercial airports, commercial aviation and maritime navigation, and many others. This 1988-1995 privatisation drive not only reinforced the capitalist economic model of keeping the means of production in the hands of private owners, but brought in large revenues for the PNL government in order to fund the government's large-scale rearmament programme and various public work projects intended to stimulate the economy, including the large-scale nationwide militarisation of the Purgation Police Force (PPF) as part of the early PNL's 'war on crime' efforts, whilst balancing the national budget all without having to raise taxes (with the top personal income rate of 16.8% remaining stable from 1988-1995 and corporate income tax rates only rising from 7.8% to 9.6% from 1988 to 1995). According to Commerce Secretary Kalle, this 'mixed economic model' of large-scale privatisation, the trimming of social welfare programmes, curtailing the power and influence of labour unions through repressive measures, reliance upon slave labour production from the Dysfonctionnel, stimulating the economy through increased spending on various rearmament and remilitarisation projects to boost wartime production efforts and create jobs, and balancing the public purse, helped rescue the Purgation economy out of the Great Recession of the 1980s and was essential to winning broader support for the PNL government especially from the middle-class. In his eyes, the proposed privatisation project was therefore not any different, in principle, from what the PNL government had done in the past.

High Inquisitor Geneviève vehemently disagreed with that suggestion, and on 19 March 2011 she pointed out to the EDP members that there was, in her view, a vast and significant difference between merely privatising certain industries and sectors, and privatising an essential security service which was vital to maintaining the country's internal security from crime, terrorism, and disorder. She likened the privatisation of the concentration camps to privatising the Purgation Intelligence Agency (PIA) or Purgation Security Service (PSS). In her view, private companies simply could not be trusted to have the wider national interest in mind in how they exploited and ran the 'liquidation facilities', since the priority would invariably be on maximising profits from the Dysfonctionnel slave labourers and not on exterminating them properly for the national good and the improvement of the overall genetic quality of the Purgation community as a whole. Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan would echo the High Inquisitor's views the next day and she represented on 20 March 2011 that her Home Office would also oppose a proposal which could compromise the internal security objectives of the 'liquidation through labour' programme, and she further reminded the EDP ministers that the Tripartite Commission (consisting of Home Office, PICOS, and PIGC officers working in concert) as empowered by EO 103/1994 had created a comprehensive 'liquidation through labour' framework for the gradual extermination of the Dysfonctionnel through a carefully planned framework of overwork, malnutrition, and exhaustion, and she feared that 'that carefully and meticulously planned framework for the elimination of this troublesome community could be upended by a fragmentation amongst individualised private actors'.

The next day, on 21 March 2011, Commerce Secretary Kalle Delcroix would again attempt to assuage the opponents to his privatisation proposal on the EDP by suggesting that the interests of the for-profit corporations who would bid for these concessions on open tender were, in fact, aligned with the security and eugenic policy interests of the Home Office, PICOS, and the PIGC. He suggested that the entire point of the 'liquidation through labour' programme was for the workers to be overworked with long, gruelling hours, to be forced to meet exacting production quotas through abuse and coercion, and to be given little sustenance and nutrition such that they would die off and waste away from overwork and malnutrition. He suggested that under a free market economy with price competition, such factors would be 'priced-into' the bidding process because companies attending the auction would bid on the assumption that they would have available a workforce liable to be exploited and abused. Consequently, he suggested that any company that participated in that auction and subsequently failed to overwork the labourers or gave the labourers sufficient rest or nutrition so as to slow their rate of demise would be 'shooting themselves in the foot'. He surmised that that concentration camp would invariably be unprofitable for the concessionaire since the concession fees they would have to pay following the auction with their competitors would have 'priced-in' the capacity for exploitation. Any company that cut back on the working hours and production quotas or increased the rest, breaks, food, or sustenance given to the labourers would eat into their own profit margins and 'lose' in the marketplace to the concessionaires who exploited and overworked the labourers as intended. In other words, he attempted to reassure the EDP that under a system of free market competition, the concessionaires simply 'could not afford to not exterminate these detainees' and thus the 'market incentives were, in fact, wholly aligned with the public policy considerations of this government'. The hardliners were not appeased by that argument and Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan described it as a 'most reckless assumption for us to make', with Commandant en Chef Delrico going further to suggest that it was 'foolish and idiotic to trust these people to perform the extermination properly', and added that 'you see, this was precisely why I opposed this 'liquidation through labour' nonsense from the very beginning, I wanted them gassed and shot so we'd quickly be rid of this mess for good, but no, and so here we are yet again yapping away and wasting our goddamn time talking about all this absurdity all over again!'

The following day, on 22 March 2011, Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval would propose a compromise suggestion which she hoped would bring the hardliners on-board with the proposed privatisation of the 'liquidation facilities'. She recommended that, instead of an 'open tender' auction and bidding process, a 'closed tender' could be held with the companies eligible to participate in the auctions being pre-determined by a 'closed list' of eligible bidders determined by the Commerce Ministry, to ensure that only trusted corporations with a history of funding the PNL party and supporting the various industrial, military, and other policy efforts of the PNL government as contractors, suppliers, creditors, and investors, would be made eligible to participate in the bidding process to begin with. Additionally, the concession contracts could be carefully worded to ensure that the concessions over the concentration camps could be terminated if certain 'liquidation targets' were not being met. Moreover, the concession contracts would only grant concessionaires rights over the operation and management of the labour units in the camps, and the enjoyment of any profits therefrom, but would not grant the concessionaires any rights of control over the camps themselves, including matters of security, which would remain under the provenance of the PICOS troopers and officers that were presently running and controlling the 'liquidation facilities'. Finally, perhaps the most important caveat of them all, in order to strengthen the for-profit 'market incentive' for these concessionaires to bolster the government's desired liquidation project, the Tripartite Commission would continue to exist and would convert its existing 'liquidation through labour' programme into a non-binding 'industry code of conduct'. While the code of conduct would not be directly binding upon concessionaires, the Tripartite Commission would track and monitor the concessionaires' compliance with the code of conduct's standards respecting working hours, production quotas, rest periods, application of physical abuse, sustenance provided (or, more accurately, the lack thereof), and of course, the actual resulting 'liquidation rate' that is obtained. The Tripartite Commission would also be empowered to determine the destination of any newly re-classified Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel - in other words, if the TECON-TECAT tribunals ruled in favour of re-classifying a person as Dysfonctionnel to be 'liquidated through labour', it would be the Tripartite Commission that would decide which 'liquidation facility' they were actually sent to, at which point it could consider the track record of a particular concessionaire and the actual results and outcomes being produced at the facility in question when determining which 'liquidation facilities' would receive more or fewer new Dysfonctionnel prisoners.

Treasury Secretary Charlotte, however, took pains to emphasise that she also agreed with Commerce Secretary Kalle that these 'carrots' and 'sticks' that she proposed would likely not even be necessary to ensure that the concessionaires overworked and under-nourished the Dysfonctionnel detainee workers since the overwhelming profit motive to cut down on the sustenance provided to the forced labourers whilst harshly ramping up their working hours and production targets was so obvious and self-evident in her view, especially as the concessionaires would invariably need to make up for their losses after successfully out-bidding their competitors in the auction process to win the contract in the first place. She also noted the historical precedent of RTCV indentured slavery and its brutal and infamous system of inféoder and how history books recorded that the life expectancy of an RTCV indentured labourer, post-enslavement, was only around 21-22 years, before remarking dryly that 'I don't believe the RTCV's directors and associés ever needed any governmental regulatory mandate to overwork all their slaves to death, now did they?' She added, however, that she hoped her compromise proposal would appease and mollify any concerns that the hardliners would have that the privatisation of the 'liquidation through labour' project would interfere with the PNL government's genocidal public policy objectives, by ensuring that PNL state organs would retain the necessary policy 'carrots' and 'sticks' at their disposal to ensure that the concessionaires could be incentivised into compliance with their public policy mandates, if need be. The next day, on 23 March 2011, various hardliners on the EDP, including Justice Secretary Devona Moreau, PIGC Director Marin de la Trémouille, Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, and even High Inquisitor Geneviève de la Fayette, would indicate their approval of the Treasury Secretary's proposed compromise, with varying degrees of reluctance.

With that, the Magnificus Dominus would give his approval for the Commerce Ministry's proposed privatisation project, with the compromise regulations and safeguards recommended by the Royal Treasury's Chambers and Treasury Secretary Charlotte de Laval, by signing and promulgating Executive Order (EO) No. 186 of 2011 on 24 March 2011. The privatisation of the 'liquidation facilities' would begin in earnest with the first set of 'auctions' being held in September 2011 under the auspices of the Commerce Ministry, and with 297 concession contracts being offered to tens of thousands of auctioning companies on a pre-approved 'closed list' of pro-PNL companies that would grant concessionaires control over 512 'liquidation facilities' and an estimated 3.857 million Dysfonctionnel slave labourers toiling away therein. Many of the participating companies would include major corporations with ties and links to the PNL regime, including many of the EDP portfolio-holders, early donors to the PNL political party, or supporters of the PNL within the Purgation media, social organisations, or business groups, such as Les Laboratoires de Corday (in which the Foreign Secretary Alain de Corday and his siblings held a major minority shareholding), Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac (in which Sylvie de Vérac, wife of Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet, held a major minority shareholding along with her father and other family members), and La Banque Purgatienne de Valentinois (dominated by a prominent Purgation banking clan, the De Valentinois family, which had been a major supporter of the PNL regime, donating heavily to the PNL political party and to the regime's various causes after the PNL's rise to power). Moreover, many of the listed PNL-friendly companies had already been involved in profiting from the PNL's 'liquidation through labour' project as contractors, suppliers, investors, creditors, purchasers of finished goods and products from PICOS, or corporate partners of the PIGC participating in various forced experimentations and unethical medical tests upon the Dysfonctionnel prisoners.

The privatisation drive merely formalised these prior private-public partnerships by granting these major corporations the power to now hold direct title and control over the labour of the Dysfonctionnel slave labourers themselves through a network of concession contracts. The 'liquidation facilities' were a very profitable commodity precisely due to the captive forced labourers therein, and from 2011 to 2013, thousands of 'liquidation facilities' would effectively be leased-out in long-term concession contracts, raking in hundreds of billions of Élites for the Royal Treasury's Chambers in upfront auction payments and further payments of regular monthly concession fees. Such concession fees soon became a major source of revenue for the Purgation government, which responded by adopting a series of 'tax cuts' intended to bolster support for the PNL government amongst big businesses and the upper and middle classes, with the Treasury at first adopting 'tax relief' schemes or 'tax rebate' programmes for its corporate partners throughout 2013, culminating in the passage of the Economic Revitalisation Act by the Purgation National Congress (PNC) on 19 March 2014, proposed by the Prèmiere Législatrice Jeanne-Emmanuelle as a 'sweeping plan to stimulate and revitalise our national economy with across-the-board tax cuts', and which passed the legislative chamber by a massive margin of 571-109 votes. The Act involved the implementation of sweeping across-the-board cuts to personal income tax rates, which saw the top personal income tax rate fall from 16.8% down to just 10.9%, the corporate income tax rate decrease from 9.6% to 6.4%, and the complete elimination of most other taxes levied on capital ownership or capital income, including property taxes, land value taxes, stamp duties, dividend income taxes, interest income taxes, inheritance taxes, financial transactions taxes, capital gains taxes, and gift taxes, paid for with the huge revenues generated by profitable concessions over 'liquidation facilities' and the forced labourers therein. The programme was marketed by the PNL government as a 'massive generous tax give-away to the Purgation middle-classes and middle-income households', which did enjoy substantial decreases in their average household income tax burdens, with the average household tax bill falling from 13.9% to 9.4%, but with the bulk of the gains still being reaped by the wealthiest Purgation households and the largest most profitable mega-corporations and corporate conglomerates especially, firmly cementing the business community's support for the Purgation government and thereby further strengthening the PNL regime's hold onto power.

Today, the PNL Purgation regime faces a number of growing social challenges and threats to the stability of its hold onto political power in the Purgation State. Some of these challenges are attributable to the changing socio-cultural landscape of the country, but others are in fact attributable to the absence of changes to the socio-economic structure of the nation in the over three decades of PNL one-party fascistic rule over the country, and the ossification and calcification of the country's historical and entrenched social inequalities. Prior to the PNL's coup and takeover of 1987-1988, Purgatio had already been one of the most unequal countries on the continent of Villalmeyda, in terms of distribution of both income and wealth, due to residual economic inequalities dating back to the industrialisation and modernisation of Purgation society, both in terms of the RTCV's colonial endeavours of 1609-1769 and the subsequent mass industrialisation of L'Époque Prospère et Belle of 1882-1927. Minor reforms were introduced by mainstream parties like the LPP which may have mitigated the inequalities to some extent, with policies such as the abolition of child labour and establishment of universal public primary school education in 1907, the introduction of a minimum wage in 1924, and the creation of a universal healthcare service in 1955; but, by and large, the country's historical inequalities remained largely untouched save for the occasional minor tokenistic reform.

Consequently, by the time the PNL was founded in 1981 and launched its coup of 1987-1988, the country's historical inequalities had reached a boiling point after centuries of calcifying socio-economic inequalities, with the nation's social divisions now having frayed into open political violence. In 1977, it was estimated that the wealthiest 100,000 households in the country (less than 0.02% of the population) owned more wealth than the bottom 500 million households combined. As these social inequalities broiled over into left-wing political violence and potential insurrection, the demonisation of the Purgation communists and socialist insurgents as harbingers of chaos, disorder, and instability, threatening to bring ruination upon the Purgation people, assured the upper and the middle classes of their continued status in the social order and provided the PNL party a basis to inflict political terror and persecution upon the burgeoning radicalisation of the lower classes, through the swift destruction of the labour movement, the widespread persecution, arbitrary imprisonment, and summary execution of labour union leaders, left-wing activists, and all members of the CPP, seizing power in a violent and undemocratic coup d'état. PNL Purgatio embarked on a number of policies which, when combined, significantly worsened the inequalities which the PNL government had inherited - mass privatisation of public services, the slashing of income taxes and elimination of capital taxes, the destruction of the independent labour movement and the abolition of all labour unions and industrial action (with workers being forcibly consolidated under a PNL-controlled labour union called L'Association Nationale des Travailleurs which had to negotiate, compromise, and share power with a PNL-controlled coalition of business enterprises called La Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie in a corporatistic, dirigistic, class-collaborationist economic model), the demonisation of persistent users of social welfare as 'moochers', 'leeches', 'parasites', and Dysfonctionnel, the use of slave labour on a massive scale in over 40,000 'liquidation facilities' across the country, coupled with the implementation of austerity measures to achieve a balanced budget, the trimming of social welfare programmes, and the elimination of the minimum wage and most industrial and labour regulations as the non-college-educated working-class now had to compete with the readily available and completely exploitable mass of slave labourers in the 'liquidation facilities'.

by **Purgatio** » Thu Aug 24, 2023 1:12 am

The end-result of all this was that, while Purgatio's entrenched inequalities brought the PNL to power, the PNL's one-party rule had the effect of worsening and ossifying many of those same social inequalities. By 2023, after roughly 35 years of PNL one-party rule of the country, the nation now had one of the highest income Gini coefficients in the world of 67.4, and the country's wealth inequality has only worsened over time, with more than 60% of the nation's wealth being owned by the top 1% of households, with the top 10% of households controlling 81-85% of the nation's wealth, and with the nation's wealthiest 6,000 households alone (less than 0.001% of households in the nation) controlling around 21-22% of the nation's total net worth, more than that held by the bottom 90% of households combined. These social trends are only likely to be exacerbated by other external factors, such as the advent of globalisation and the growth of new technologies disproportionately affecting the manufacturing sector and industrial labourers. And with the country hitting close to its production possibilities curve, the potential for further growth in the Purgation economy is slim, and annual GDP growth has stalled and stagnated, hovering at around 1-3% every year throughout 2013-2023, at least for those years with positive GDP growth at all. The result is an economy where wealth inequality is only likely to worsen over time as the rate of return on capital (around 6-8%) far exceeds the rate of growth of the economy as a whole, and in the past few years the median real wage growth per annum has hovered between 1.7% and 0.1%, with the bottom 20% of households experiencing an average annual decline in their real wages of roughly -3.3% per annum, when adjusted for inflation, from 2017-2023. The result is a society that is increasingly fracturing once again, with internal social stability fraying at the edges, and with growing inter-class resentments between the upper, middle, and lower classes of the nation.

In addition to the inequalities of income and wealth which have been exacerbated by a combination of global trends and the deliberate policies pursued by the PNL government, social mobility has stalled within Purgation society and become largely non-existent. The primary cause for this is that the present model of the Purgation model resembles that of a rentier economy. An estimated 32-43% of the nation's annual profits and total wealth is attributable, either directly or indirectly, to the 'forced labour' system of the Dysfonctionnel slave workers being 'liquidated through labour', with a Home Office report on January 2023 estimating that the number of available Dysfonctionnel labourers in the 'liquidation facilities' of the previous year had fluctuated between 338.33 million prisoners on the low end to 380.65 million detainees on the high end, distributed amongst 49,184 'liquidation facilities' in total, with over 90% of them (44,971 out of 49,184) having been privatised and auctioned-off in 27,895 long-term 'concession contracts' and generating annual revenues of anywhere between US$21.32 to 25.81 trillion (roughly 25-30% of the Purgation annual GDP). With this informal de facto 'slave market' over the exploitable labour of around 350 million detained persons constituting such a substantial and profitable sector of the Purgation economy, an extractive rentier economy was erected in which wealth creation was tied, to a substantial degree, to one's proximity to power and relative capacity to access and then profit from this particular marketplace - in other words, an oligarchical economic model where a small segment of the populace extracts their profits from the slave labour of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel forced labourers, which they gain access to by supporting and propping up the PNL regime with their resources, in exchange for access to 'concession contracts' over the nation's many 'des facilités de liquidation', a small oligarchical clique that benefits disproportionately from the profits of a slave-driven rentier economy creating an elite milieu of patron-client relationships now critical to keeping the PNL regime in power.

As a result, intergenerational social mobility has fallen significantly since the PNL's rise to power, with intergenerational economic immobility (measured by income inelasticity, or the extent to which a child's adult earnings are tied to the earnings of their parent) increasing from an estimated 0.577 in 1990 to an estimated 0.751 in 2010 - what this means, in concrete terms, is that following decades of PNL rule, the income of the household that a child is born into in Purgatio is now substantially more determinative (75.1%) of their future expected income than in the past (57.7%). This is a logical consequence of the extractive, slave-driven rentier oligarchical economy which PNL Purgatio has erected in recent decades, all off of the backs of its eugenically-motivated genocidal exterminatory project. The ability to profit from the 'liquidation facilities' is not tied to personal advancement or effort but one's ability to access the necessary financial capital to invest into the 'liquidation facilities' and their long-term 'concession contracts' at the Commerce Ministry's closed auctions, or purchase or lease a 'concession contract' from an existing concessionaire, which in turn depends on the economic and social capital of one's household, i.e., the financial resources that a child inherits and the social connections their family has in order to access the elite networks of patronage and power needed to profit from the 'liquidation facilities' and the slave labour of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel to begin with. These are resources which, logically, a child is much more likely to be born with than something one can be expected to work to achieve by virtue of one's own individual efforts, talents, or abilities alone.

It is also important to appreciate that profiting from the slave labour of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel extends to more than simply winning a 'concession contract' at a closed auction and then extracting the profits from the forced labour of the slave workers who are being overworked to death in a gruesome 'liquidation through labour' genocidal exterminatory project, although that is certainly the most obvious and direct means of profiting from the forced labour of the Dysfonctionnel. Entire industries within the Purgation economy now profit, secondarily, from the slave labour market of the Dysfonctionnel, including financial industries lending cheap credit for 'concession contract' auctions in exchange for repayments out of the profits from the camps themselves, private equity firms bundling or restructuring various shares in the profits of such 'concession contracts' into new financial products (often nicknamed des profits à prendre by hedge fund managers and private equity firms) to be sold to investors, PICOS suppliers and contractors who are awarded government contracts relating to the supply, construction, or maintenance of 'liquidation facilities', PIGC corporate partners testing pharmaceutical products, medical devices, and surgical operations upon Dysfonctionnel prisoners, Home Office contractors awarded government contracts relating to the installation of surveillance equipment or provision of specialised security services to guard the camps and the prisoners therein, an entire secondary trading market of concessionaires selling off or sub-leasing the labour of their Dysfonctionnel labourers to clients and sub-contractors for other profitable business ventures on long-term and short-term leases alike, corporate and transactional lawyers from major law firms tasked with designing creative new ways of legally structuring their clients' dealings and transactions in the forced labour of the Dysfonctionnel through trusts, sub-trusts, leases, sub-leases, contractual licences, etc., accountancy firms who provide accountancy services for concessionaires and certify the 'profit and loss' statements of individual camps to be sent to the Tripartite Commission's inspectors or to potential investors and creditors, corporate service providers who assist Purgation and foreign companies alike to invest in the Dysfonctionnel slave labour market whilst hiding their involvement in that controversial market through complicated networks of hidden trust estates, nominee shareholders, layers of corporate veiling, in order to protect their corporate reputations from being trashed or tarnished in more liberal overseas markets with more self-proclaimed 'ethically conscious' consumers, and numerous other derivative or parasitical markets raking in tens of trillions of Élites in profits annually off of PNL Purgatio's ongoing genocide of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel.

The ability to access this substantial market is hugely gatekept by a person's access to economic, social, and cultural capital, thereby locking out numerous children from the opportunity to potentially reap the benefits of this industry by virtue of being born into a household lacking such resources from the outset. This is not to say that social mobility is completely absent in Purgatio, but opportunities for social advancement are shrinking significantly because lower-class labour for non-college-educated workers has seen significant reductions in both the quantity of such jobs available and in the quality of the employment benefits and remuneration offered for such work simply by virtue of the fact that firms now have a much cheaper and far more efficient alternative in the form of readily exploitable Dysfonctionnel slave workers who can be abused - and indeed, whom companies are supposed to abuse to the point of death under the Tripartite Commission's prevailing 'liquidation through labour' standards. PNL Purgation economic policies therefore actively made it harder and much more difficult for a child of a lower-income, lower-class background to move up the social ladder, not only because of the toll that the regime's 'liquidation through labour' policies had on the un-enslaved manufacturing labour market, the hollowing-out of such jobs, and the attendant wage repressive effects, but other socially Darwinistic policies motivated by a classist view of the lower classes which actively harmed the social mobility of lower-class children attempting to ascend into the more 'comfortable' or 'educated' middle-class of 'skilled workers', including the over-policing of poorer, high-crime neighbourhoods by a militarised police force empowered to operate with impunity, the disproportionate re-classification of lower-income persons as Dysfonctionnel on account of being criminals, homeless, 'moochers' or so on, contributing to a general depredation and hollowing-out of lower-income and economically-deprived neighbourhoods by the loss of many of their residents and workers into 'liquidation facilities', the systematic slashing of the welfare state over time, mass privatisation programs contributing to numerous public services becoming increasingly unaffordable to the lower classes, the destruction of independent trade unions and the labour movement as a whole, and the gradual elimination or relaxation of most labour regulations and protections (such as the elimination of the minimum wage, permitting zero-hour contracts, relaxing rules regulating overtime labour or retrenchments and redundancies by employers, and embracing the labour market liberalisations of the so-called 'gig economy'), causing the bottom 20% of households to see gradual but substantial declines in their average real wages of approximately -3.3% per annum, after adjusting for inflation, during the decades of PNL one-party rule in Purgatio, and with the next lowest 20% of households seeing their average wages largely stagnate in real terms within the same time period. In fact, the most reliable route for a lower-income, working-class Purgation child to attain a stable livelihood is, ironically, pursuing various careers which serve to prop up the PNL regime's hold onto power, such as becoming a soldier in the Purgation Armed Forces (PAF), a constable in the Purgation Police Force (PPF), a trooper or concentration camp guard with PICOS, a paramilitary soldier in the Purification Order, or an ordinary rank-and-file party activist of the PNL.

And as for the college-educated middle-class, while it is possible for middle-class children to obtain a decent job and standard of living by plying their 'skilled labour' in a typical white-collar professional, corporate managerial, or civil service administrative job, like that of their parents, nevertheless, breaking into the extremely profitable rent-seeking oligarchy or the elite haute bourgeoisie which controls and dominates the commercial trade in the labour of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, simply by virtue of one's sheer talent or individual hard work alone is obviously not possible. Instead, one would have to be fortunate enough to be born into the select few wealthy and well-connected families - like the favoured households on the PIGC Registry of Les Enfants du Ciel, for instance - to have the financial capital and social connections necessary to participate in that market and reap the profits therefrom. The result is the creation and maintenance of a deeply hierarchical and largely hereditary oligarchy where a huge segment of the economy reaps profits from a stagnant and entirely extractive rentier industry - profiting from the slave labour of the Dysfonctionnel - access to which is heavily gatekept and dependent largely upon one's birth into particular politically favoured households, such as the De Lussan family which controls a substantial minority interest in a major bank, Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon, that invests trillions of Élites into 'concession contract' sales, leases, and auctions every year, or the De Corday family which controls a substantial plurality shareholding in the country's largest pharmaceutical company, Les Laboratoires de Corday, which owns and controls over 560 'concession contracts' over 887 'liquidation facilities' with the millions of Dysfonctionnel prisoners interned therein being exploited for the company's pharmaceutical productions operations and the forcible testing of new drugs, medical devices, treatments, and agricultural chemicals.

However, it is also critical to appreciate that PNL Purgatio's wealthy bourgeois elite still operates under a governmental fascistic oligarchy, in which the wealth and power of the ruling class depends upon its members' adherence to, and continued loyalty and fealty towards, the ruling PNL one-party regime as evidenced by their support which props up its continued monopoly upon legal and political power in the Purgation State. This is because the Purgation economy under PNL fascism follows a 'mixed' economic model that is corporatistic or dirigistic in nature, it is not a laissez-faire capitalist economic system following a liberal 'free market' system in which the actions of businesses and corporations are ostensibly 'freed' and 'liberated' from the interventions or regulations of the government. While the PNL Purgation economic model was certainly not socialistic, keeping the means of production firmly in private hands and even using the power of the State to actively suppress the influence of labour and the mass organisation of the working-class for the benefit of the regime's key corporate patrons and wealthiest benefactors, it also intervened to curtail and even actively destroy the fortunes of wealthy Purgations who stepped out of line or attempted to weaponise their wealth against the PNL regime. In a way, this can be understood as the members of the PNL Purgation ruling class policing itself and the conduct of its own members in a process of politically-motivated self-regulation. The economy, whilst unequal, functioned by way of domination under an oligarchical clique, which paradoxically both completely controlled the PNL regime but was also completely controlled by the PNL regime. The ruling regime was beholden to the interests of that clique to maintain its continued grip over the broader society and its institutions, but if a member of that elite attempted to rebel against or undermine the existing social order using their wealth, power, and connections, then they would be brutally and ruthlessly expelled from the same closed cartel that controlled and gatekept access to the country's most important and profitable asset - the slave labour of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel - and the all-powerful organs of state would immediately be weaponised to swiftly and efficiently destroy that former oligarch's wealth and power and the social influence and prestige of their family within the corridors of power of Purgation 'high society'. That oligarchical relationship between the State and its wealthy elite is made clear by the case study of the 2018-2020 downfall of the highly prestigious De La Pierre family of legal practitioners.

The De La Pierres were a family disproportionately composed of barristers whose members included prominent barristers dating all the way back to the late 1500s when the legal sector was significantly more closed-off and exclusionary, in which access to the barrister profession was heavily gatekept and guarded by the Inns of Court, which functioned as 'closed shop' feudal guilds operating under the monopoly of royal charters and whose governing bodies strictly controlled and restricted any entrance into such guilds only to elite, well-connected families with sufficiently high-placed social ties to other prominent barristers already in charge of such Inns, demonstrating the extent of the De La Pierres' historical prestige and social influence at the Purgation Bar. It all started when the patriarch of the De La Pierre family's main branch, Marc-Henri de la Pierre, A.C., a prominent commercial and international arbitration barrister, began making critical statements about the 'absence of judicial independence' in Purgatio and its 'deleterious impact upon the constitutional tradition of the rule of law', at a foreign conference on commercial and international arbitration held in the Animirian Federation's capital city of New Hanseatian on 21 February 2018. The remarks would prompt outrage from senior members of the Purgation judiciary, including prominent Supreme Court Justices such as Lady Justice Cateline d'Évreux and Lady Justice Ludivine de Bauffremont, senior members of the Purgation Bar such as Blaise de Beaucastel, A.C. of the high-ranking commercial set Les Chambres dans la rue Fouvrier and René du Châteauveuf-Alsace, A.C., of the leading chancery set Les Chambres au Boulevard Jeunetienne, and high-ranking members of the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC), Edith d'Alsace and Robert Antonin d'Hénin-Liétard, would all issue scathing public statements from 21-28 February 2018, criticising Marc-Henri de la Pierre, A.C., publicly for 'defaming the judiciary', 'making unsupportable statements undermining the rule of law and a rules-based domestic order', and 'undermining trust and confidence in peaceful dispute-resolution in this country'.

Undeterred, Marc-Henri would double-down on his criticisms at several other international conferences and in statements to foreign journalists and international organisations such as the International Bar Association. His son, a prominent human rights barrister, Louis de la Pierre, would back up his father's remarks to international human rights organisations such as the World Assembly (WA) Human Rights Committee and Human Rights Watch, going so far as to suggest in an interview on 19 March 2018 that 'any rulings or awards out of the Purgation jurisdiction ought to be viewed overseas with a healthy degree of scepticism as to the propriety of the result reached'. The remark prompted a swift rebuke from the Lady President of the Supreme Court, Clothilde d'Hénin-Liétard d'Alsace, on 20 March 2018, who condemned his remarks as 'dangerous', 'bereft of evidence', 'wild speculation', and 'slanderous to the legal profession and the judicial officers of this nation'. Her condemnation was notable because the Dame Présidente de la Cour Suprême had actually married into the De La Pierre family, her husband was another prominent commercial barrister, Jacques-Laurent du Raj de la Pierre, A.C., who was a second cousin of Marc-Henri de la Pierre, A.C., sharing a great-grandfather and a great-grandmother with one another. The two of them had a seven-year-old daughter at the time, Diane du Raj de la Pierre, who had been conceived under the auspices of Les Enfants du Ciel, demonstrating the extent of the prestige and the connections enjoyed by the De La Pierre family. The public intervention of the Lady President Clothilde significantly escalated the public feuding into a battle between different branches of the De La Pierre family.

The main branch of the De La Pierres, however, led by Marc-Henri and his son Louis, did not back down even as the feuding and the public conflict escalated. Louis de la Pierre would cause international embarrassment to the country of Purgatio when, on 27 March 2018, he announced he would be joining a star-studded team of international advocates in over 200 class-action lawsuits against the assets of more than 200 prominent PNL-friendly Purgation companies in the economy of the Visserien Vrijstaat, brought by tens of thousands of refugees under the Visserien Alien Torts Statute who had allegedly escaped from Purgation 'liquidation facilities', with such companies including Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon, Les Investissements Commerciaux de Marais, Les Pharmacetiques de Vérac, and Les Laboratoires de Corday, corporate entities in which various high-ranking members of the EDP Government held substantial direct or indirect interests. The lawsuits would allege that these companies were joint tortfeasors against the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel plaintiffs for having knowingly participated in the various acts of genocide or crimes against humanity of the PNL Purgation government. Louis de la Pierre would make public statements from 1-8 April 2018 criticising the Purgation government as a 'bloodthirsty regime' and calling for the PNL-linked companies named in the lawsuit to be 'named and shamed across the globe', 'made to answer for their complicity in the regime's many crimes', and to 'show remorse for their repugnant profiteering off of slave labour and genocide by voluntarily making a full apology and according complete restitution and compensation to the victims and to their families'. When Attorney-General Lucien Vannier and Justice Secretary Devona Moreau issued a joint statement on 10 April 2018 demanding that the remarks be withdrawn for 'defaming the reputation of this government and baselessly libelling many prominent firms and companies in this nation', the demand for an apology from two prominent Ministers on the EDP would be ignored by Louis and brusquely rebuffed by his father, Marc-Henri, who called the statement a 'dangerous interference' and a 'blatant disrespect for the institutional independence of the Purgation Bar and the neutrality of the barrister profession in this nation'.

And the De La Pierres' main branch of the family would escalate the feud further still when, on 19 June 2018, Marc-Henri de la Pierre submitted to the Commercial Court of the Freie Stadt Schwelitz that a commercial arbitration award rendered in Purgatio should not be enforced against the judgment debtor's assets in the Freie Stadt Schwelitz because the award 'violated Schwelitzian public policy and the ordre public values of this jurisdiction'. The award concerned the enforcement of an insurance contract in Purgatio between two foreign companies (an Animirian private insurance company and a Stulitian state-owned enterprise) which insured the Stulitian enterprise's financial investments in a 'credit-default swap' commercial arrangement offered by the Animirian insurance company, with a clause which provided for neutral arbitration under the auspices of the Purgation Court of International Arbitration (PCIA). The Stulitian company prevailed before the PCIA tribunal and wished to enforce the arbitral award against the defendant's assets in a number of foreign jurisdictions, including the Freie Stadt Schwelitz. Marc-Henri de la Pierre was engaged by the Animirian judgment-debtor and instructed to set aside the award before the Purgation courts and to resist enforcement of the award in all foreign jurisdictions. In so doing, Marc-Henri would make a number of arguments before the Commercial Court of Schwelitz which would further scandalise the Purgation Bar and judiciary, by making claims that arbitral awards rendered under the PCIA rules were 'incompatible with natural justice' due to the 'overriding political influence of the PNL fascistic regime wielded over all arbiters operating within that jurisdiction, including both judicial and arbitral institutions in that country'. He would also make allegations in his submissions that the Stulitian state-owned enterprise's investments, when the disbursed funds were traced to their ultimate destination, included investments in numerous local companies which had made substantial investments in the 'concession contracts' over Purgation 'liquidation facilities', and therefore to enforce the insurance contract would be to provide 'derivative assistance to the accessorial acts of deliberate profiteering out of the ongoing enslavement and genocide of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel community in Purgatio' and therefore 'wholly incompatible with the ordre public fundamental moral and social values undergirding the overriding public policy interests of the Schwelitzian jurisdiction'.

The retaliation which followed against the De La Pierre family was slow, gradual, but no less systematic. In many ways, it seemed a classical case of multiple wealthy families in the Purgation ruling elite banding together to pool together their resources and collective influence to tear down and destroy a member of their clique which had fallen out of line. First, from June to October of 2018, the media outlets owned by the De Sablé household and the Courvoisier family (which had intermarried into an old aristocratic household and soon became the family of Du Roussillon-Courvoisier) began to issue a flood of negative stories about various solicitors and barristers within De La Pierre family, dripping numerous accusations against different legal practitioners intended to cast a shroud of suspicion over the family as a whole. Marc-Henri's sister, Marie Joséphine de la Pierre, was a solicitor and senior partner holding equity in a top law firm in Purgatio, and several stories would break accusing her of embezzling client monies, holding wild orgies with the children of clients behind their backs, her frequent travels to various far-flung islands of the Freie Stadt Schwelitz and Visserien Vrijstaat were speculated to be getaways for her to host drunken orgies with minors away from the prying eyes of her fellow partners. Rumours of secret homosexuality, bestiality, sexual abuse, and paedophilia were levelled against a senior appellate judge, Alain-Henri de la Pierre, the uncle of Marc-Henri. Rumours of fabricating evidence to assist clients, of witness-coaching, of teaching immigrant clients to fabricate false information on their visa application documents, of coaching criminal defendants to repeat pre-drafted defences against their charges, of bribing witnesses to provide false alibi evidence for criminal defendants he had represented in the past, were levelled against Louis de la Pierre, his brothers Gérard de la Pierre and Casimir de la Pierre, all of whom were human rights and criminal defence lawyers. Numerous allegations would be levelled against the patriarch Marc-Henri himself, ranging from child abuse, domestic violence, maintenance and champerty, offering to fund litigation for potential clients, touting in violation of ethical rules, offering to pay referral fees to 'runners' touting his services, stealing clients from other barristers at his set through threats, harassment, and intimidation, routinely forcing junior barristers at his set to do his work for him for free without remuneration under threat of ruining their professional careers and reputations in the industry, making false representations to the Commercial Court in various affidavits to further his clients' interests, suborning perjury, getting his son an early start in the legal industry by bribing law schools and barristers' sets to hire him or offer mini-pupillages or write glowing recommendations. These negative allegations were always accompanied with a hyper-focussed media coverage fixating on stories of every alleged extravagant expense of the De La Pierres, the cost of their luxury vacations, the number of homes they had, the cost of their luxury sports cars, their private jet, the salaries paid out for their huge household staff, how much they paid on haute couture in particular years, the hotels they stayed in during vacations overseas, the cost of polo, rowing, and equestrian coaching for their children, stories of chauffeurs and chaperones accompanying the family's children as they attended their schools, and so on, thereby layering the negative accusations against the De La Pierres with a corresponding focus on the extravagant and luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by their members. Thousands of such stories would be run over Purgation media over the course of more than five months straight, inundating the domestic cultural sphere from June-October 2018.

Nearing the end of this media campaign, a series of legal and disciplinary proceedings and investigations would then be instituted against the De La Pierres, all at once, by various members of the Purgation elite families. Clients and other members of the Bar would file complaints with the Solicitors' Regulation Authority against Marie Joséphine, Gérard, and Casimir de la Pierre in November 2018, accusing them of touting, maintenance and champerty, witness-coaching, fabrication of evidence, and suborning perjury, amongst a litany of other allegations of professional misconduct. On 14 December 2018, a complaint would be filed against the senior appellate judge Alain-Henri de la Pierre to the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) by over fourteen different lawyers alleging he acted in a biased and unprofessional fashion in the handling of their cases. On 19 December 2018, affidavits would be filed by six different Supreme Court Justices backing up such allegations, including Lady Justice Cateline d'Évreux, Lady Justice Ludivine de Bauffremont, and Lady President Clothilde d'Hénin-Liétard d'Alsace. From late December 2018 to early January 2019, over thirty complaints would be lodged to the Inn of Court, La Vénérable Association de la Pivoine Rose, against the human rights barrister Louis de la Pierre by judges, barristers, and clients, accusing him of varieties of misconduct, ranging from criminal contempt of court, to misappropriating client monies, to the sexual harassment and abuse of junior barristers at his set. And on 30 January 2019, a prominent commercial barrister hailing from another Les Enfants du Ciel family with an extensive history of ties and connections to the Purgation legal industry, Marianne de Beaucastel, A.C., of the high-placed De Beaucastel family, would lodge a criminal complaint against the patriarch Marc-Henri de la Pierre, A.C., accusing him of having committed a series of criminal offences to win a recent commercial arbitration against her client that was held before a PCIA-constituted tribunal, in which he had allegedly bribed, harassed, and badgered a forensic expert witness into providing affidavit evidence favourable to his client to deceive and mislead the tribunal members on the proper assessment of damages. The complaint was backed up by the expert in question, a prominent Purgation accountant, Baptiste Duchâtel, who would give a witness statement to the Purgation Police Force (PPF) backing up Marianne's allegation.

The tidal wave of negative press and multiple disciplinary proceedings escalated further still when prominent companies and figures in the PNL government would begin filing numerous high-profile lawsuits against members of De La Pierre family. In March 2019, numerous PNL-linked companies including Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon, Les Laboratoires de Corday, Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac, and Les Investissements Commerciaux de Marais, would file lawsuits against Louis de la Pierre, accusing him of libel, slander, malicious prosecution, breach of confidence, misuse of private information, tortious conspiracy to injure, malicious falsehoods, tortious interference with economic relations, amongst multiple other allegations, and with the claimed damages being sought exceeding hundreds of millions of Élites in compensatory and exemplary damages, per lawsuit. In April 2019, a high-profile string of defamation lawsuits would be brought against Marc-Henri de la Pierre by prominent figures within the PNL government, including the Attorney-General Lucien Vannier, the Justice Secretary Devona Moreau, the Lady President of the Supreme Court, Clothilde d'Hénin-Liétard d'Alsace, two Lady Justices of the Supreme Court (Cateline d'Évreux and Ludivine de Bauffremont), Home Secretary Joslyn de Lussan, Edith d'Alsace and Robert Antonin d'Hénin-Liétard of the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC), eleven other civil servants holding key positions in the senior leaderships of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, five other senior members of the Bar in the JAC, eighteen other senior appellate judges, and many more, over 50 defamation lawsuits were filed against him with all of these lawsuits claiming compensatory and punitive damages well in excess of $300 million Élites in total. And on 18 April 2019, Marc-Henri's Inn of Court, La Vénérable Association de la Camélia Lavande, indicated that Marc-Henri was under pending investigations to determine if he should be disciplined or even expelled and disbarred on the basis of 'recent allegations of misconduct rendering him no longer a fit and proper person to remain an honourable member of the Purgation Bar'.

Purgation 'high society', particularly the elite Les Enfants du Ciel families which dominated the artistic, cultural, social, charitable, and philanthropic scenes and circles of the elite social milieu of the nation, caused immense and irreparable damage to the social reputations of the De La Pierres when, one after another, major artistic and cultural bodies in the nation began dropping the De La Pierres completely from their fundraising galas, formal dinners, functions, charitable events, removing them from their boards of trustees of major organisations, refusing their donations and returning any of their donated objects and cheques whilst accompanied by the issuance of very public statements, and generally began disinviting them en masse from all major high-profile soirées and events. Estée du Jardin-de-Fleurs announced on 27 April 2019 that Marc-Henri de la Pierre would be dropped from the governing board of L'Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art and L'Institut National du Patrimoine and disinvited from all future events. On 5 May 2019, Charles de la Falaise announced that Louis and Gérard de la Pierre would be removed from the board of trustees of Le Conseil Royal du Patrimoine and disinvited from an upcoming charity fundraiser for La Musée Royale d'Auxerre. On 19 May 2019, Jean-Paul de Muset announced that his family foundation, La Fondation Patrimoniale du Grand-Duc de Minière, would be refusing all further donations from the De La Pierre family members and disinviting them from all future social events. And on 31 May 2019, Charles-René de Créquy announced that La Fondation Royale du Prince d'Auxiliora would be dropping Marc-Henri, Louis, and Alain-Henri de la Pierre from their selection committees for the organisation's most prestigious tertiary education scholarships, and would be dropping Marie Joséphine de la Pierre from being their spokesperson and honoured guest for its various galas and fundraising events. The damage to the prestige and reputation of the De La Pierre household was incalculable. In one fell swoop, they had been outcasted and un-personned from Purgation 'high society' in a series of humiliating and degrading high-profile banishments from the nation's haut monde, damning excommunications which only further reinforced the cumulative impression that the family members had erred in some serious way and been disgraced and brought to severe disrepute as a result of their actions.

With their social prestige and reputation now in complete tatters, the family's careers and economic fortunes would soon be targeted and destroyed next. Marc-Henri de la Pierre was disbarred and expelled from his Inn of Court on 11 June 2019, and Louis de la Pierre's Inn of Court followed suit on 23 June 2019. From late June to early July 2019, Marie Joséphine, Alain-Henri, Gérard, and Casimir de la Pierre would be permanently expelled from the legal profession and stripped of their licences to act as legal practitioners, and by 19 July 2019, Alain-Henri would be formally removed from the bench by the JAC. Prominent clients were publicly embarrassed as old cases handled by the De La Pierres were re-opened and re-tried following a series of lawsuits filed by opportunistic opposing lawyers seeking to overturn prior court victories by arguing that a 'substantial risk of injustice' would occur if prior cases handled by various lawyers in the De La Pierre family were not re-opened so that evidence of possible unethical or professional misconduct could be investigated and potentially unearthed. As prominent defamation lawsuits continued against Marc-Henri and Louis de la Pierre, Purgation courts would begin to issue Mareva injunctions freezing most of the De La Pierres' family assets, homes, cars, and bank accounts, bringing the De La Pierres to the brink of financial ruination, on the ostensible justification of preventing Marc-Henri and Louis from engaging in 'an anticipated dissipation of their assets to frustrate the satisfaction of any prospective judgment that may be rendered against them in future'. That renowned family, once estimated by Forbes magazine in 2019 to have a total familial net worth of US$2.98 billion, would soon find themselves unable to access the bulk of their family's assets.

Their misfortunes would not end there. Marc-Henri de la Pierre would have his passport impounded in prosecutorial proceedings on 15 July 2019, he would be remanded in pre-trial detention and denied bail on account of him being a 'flight risk' on 28 July 2019. His son, Louis de la Pierre, would abscond and remain in self-imposed exile in the Animirian Federation, announcing on 29 July 2019 that he and his family would not be returning to Purgatio because he feared for his life and safety. His refusal to return to Purgatio would result in 'judgment in default' being entered against him by 16 Purgation companies suing him for over $4.8 billion Élites in total. As Louis de la Pierre was deemed a 'no show' in these court proceedings, the claimant companies won by default in his absence and were entitled to proceed against Louis de la Pierre for the whole claimed sum. Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon would be the first to file for bankruptcy proceedings against Louis de la Pierre, who would be adjudged a bankrupt by the Insolvency & Bankruptcy Court on 9 August 2019, and a trustee-in-bankruptcy was appointed over all his assets. Creditors began to invoke 'morality clauses' in credit and loan agreements to prematurely call in all the debts of two major corporations in which the De La Pierre family held substantial shareholding interests, Wargrave Publishing House Limited and Raisgôt Livres, which caused both companies to be quickly wound-up and liquidated by the end of August 2019. Creditors who were owed monies by various companies and entities owned directly or indirectly by various members of the De La Pierre family began to scramble for the family's assets, taking out a flurry of applications for various family companies to be liquidated, wound-up, and for the assets to be quickly disbursed and distributed amongst various banks and other institutional lenders and non-institutional creditors. By the end of September 2019, it was estimated that the total net worth of all the De La Pierre main branch family members, combined, had dwindled down to less than $2.1 million Élites, a far cry indeed from the billionaire status that the family had once enjoyed. The barristers' sets of both Marc-Henri and Louis de la Pierre had been forever 'tainted' by their association with two prominent former members of the Bar that had fallen from grace so drastically and dramatically, as clients began to flee from those chambers like rats from a sinking ship. The former law firms of Marie Joséphine, Gérard, and Casimir de la Pierre all suffered the same fate, forced to shutter their doors and declare bankruptcy as clients abandoned these firms en masse and fled to the perceived safety of other prestigious law firms controlled by other elite, prestigious Purgation families with long-standing reputations in the Purgation legal industry - D'Évreux family, De Bauffremont family, D'Alsace family, Du Châteauveuf family, and De Beaucastel family - the very same elite families which, not so coincidentally, had members who had played crucial and prominent roles in facilitating that family's downfall and collapse in the first place, and whose other members were now handily and handsomely scooping up the financial fruits of the De La Pierres' utter and most thorough ruination.

On 7 September 2019, the wife of Louis de la Pierre, Juliette-Élise de la Pierre (née d'Amboise), would show up at a Purgation port of entry with her three minor children, seeking refuge. She would claim in a televised interview publicised to over a billion Purgations that she and her children had been kidnapped and held captive by her husband, Louis de la Pierre, in their apartment in the capital city of the Animirian Federation, New Hanseatian, when she refused to live in hiding and wanted to return to Purgatio. She announced that she would be filing for divorce against Louis de la Pierre, regretted ever marrying him, and hoped that her former friends in Purgation 'high society' could forgive her for her silence and for her perceived prior support for her husband, which she claimed had been entirely the product of coercion as Louis de la Pierre had been beating and physically abusing her and her children for years throughout the marriage in an effort to control her. The Attorney-General of Purgatio, Lucien Vannier, who was a cousin-in-law of Juliette-Élise (having married her first cousin, Delphine d'Amboise), would issue a public statement on 8 September 2019, expressing his outrage at the 'horrific abuse visited upon Juliette-Élise and her children as she suffered in silence at the hands of a tyrannical and despotic monster all these years, as we were all left in the dark, all left none the wiser about the horrors she and her children were enduring, alone'. He pledged his full support for Juliette-Élise and promised to do whatever he could to ensure that 'Louis de la Pierre is punished for his scurrilous and remorseless abuse of his wife and his children, at once'.

Juliette-Élise d'Amboise would file a criminal complaint against her husband on 10 September 2019, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) would bring over thirty-five charges against Louis de la Pierre for assault, battery, malicious wounding, family violence, and controlling and coercive behaviour in a family relationship, against his wife and three children, with a warrant being issued for his arrest on 29 September 2019, but with Louis de la Pierre indicating publicly that he would not return to Purgatio as he believed that all accusations levelled against him were 'entirely fabricated and politically motivated'. When the Animirian government refused to arrest and extradite Louis de la Pierre to be sent to Purgatio to stand trial, the trial proceeded in absentia based on the testimony of Juliette-Élise d'Amboise alone, with the CPS prosecutors explaining that the minor children would not be called as Juliette-Élise could provide eye-witness testimony for the abuse they suffered and they did not wish to needlessly re-traumatise them. Louis de la Pierre would be convicted on all charges on 3 November 2019, with him still refusing to return to Purgatio to serve his sentence. The 're-classification' proceedings initiated against him by the Attorney-General's Office (AGO) would continue in absentia with the TECON tribunal voting unanimously to have him re-classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel on 25 November 2019. On 18 December 2019, Louis de la Pierre would be found dead in his apartment in New Hanseatian due to exposure to the lethal nerve agent VX, with Animirian police suspecting the involvement of the Purgation government but with no concrete suspects being identified or placed under arrest for his alleged murder. On 29 March 2020, his father, Marc-Henri de la Pierre would be convicted on charges of bribery, fraud, corruption, suborning perjury, obstruction of justice, contempt of court, and other offences concerning the administration of justice, and sentenced to a total of 47 years' imprisonment (subject to the outcome of a 're-classification' hearing, if any), for allegedly threatening and bribing the accountant Baptiste Duchâtel into providing false evidence on affidavit for an assessment of damages (AD) hearing before a commercial arbitral tribunal all the way back in August 2008. He would be re-classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel by a TECON tribunal on 6 June 2020, sent by the Tripartite Commission to a 'liquidation facility' controlled by Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac on 10 June 2020, and he would perish soon after on 30 June 2020 from asphyxiation during a dangerous and forcible medical experiment performed upon him involving the testing of the company's new drug products on his person.

The ultimate and most potent symbol of the family's definite social downfall and the collapse of their prestige and reputation was when the PIGC Director, Marin de la Trémouille, announced on 15 July 2020 that the PIGC had 're-assessed' the genetic stock and quality of the members of the De La Pierre family, and would be striking off the De La Pierre household from the PIGC Registry of eligible Les Enfants du Ciel families. The entire main branch of the De La Pierre family, including Marc-Henri's sister, Marie Joséphine de la Pierre, her siblings and cousins and their children, and Louis de la Pierre's siblings, Gérard and Casimir, and all their cousins and their children, would be forever disgraced in the eyes of Purgation 'high society', losing all of their honour and privileges as exemplified by their collective loss of the prestigious genetic classification of being a member of one of the nation's most elite high-ranking Les Maisons du Ciel. The only branches of the De La Pierre family spared from this social destruction and ruination were, perhaps not so coincidentally, the descendants and immediate relatives of Jacques-Laurent du Raj de la Pierre, A.C., the second-cousin of Marc-Henri de la Pierre, who had married the Lady President of the Supreme Court, Clothilde d'Hénin-Liétard d'Alsace, and thereby inter-married into another elite household that had played a prominent role in engineering the De La Pierres' fall from social grace, as well as the three minor children of Louis de la Pierre, who had been spared from being struck off the Les Enfants du Ciel registry of the PIGC by virtue of the fact that their mother, Juliette-Élise d'Amboise, and her family (La Maison d'Amboise) still retained their privileges and prestige within Purgation 'high society', largely as a result of the actions of Juliette-Élise herself and her family's connections to the Attorney-General Lucien Vannier. Soon after, on 1 August 2020, Le Grand Roi de la Purgatio Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette would make that social disgrace official by signing a royal edict stripping the entire De La Pierre family of all their feudal seigneurial titles, estates, and holdings on account of 'their irreparable disgrace, dishonour, and disrepute', including the famous Marquisat de Paisvierre, which was deemed to have reverted back to the allodial Crown Estate.

The swift downfall of the De La Pierre household from 2018-2020 represents a potent and harrowing example of the oligarchical nature of the PNL Purgation government's relationship with the Purgation State's ruling wealthy elite, whose members control and dominate the policy agenda of the PNL government but whose continued hold onto such wealth and power now also depends, to a very large extent, on the continued support and protection of that same PNL government.

This, however, brings up a major problem facing the continued hold onto power of the ruling PNL regime, namely that while the government has certainly enriched the interests of the elite oligarchical clique that sustains its control over the populace and consequently retains the very strong support of that elite milieu, the same cannot be said in respect of the broader Purgation populace, in which mainstream support for the PNL regime is certainly not where it once was in the late 1980s or early 1990s when the PNL regime first seized power in the country. A major issue facing the PNL government is that the same propagandist tactics which had allowed the PNL regime to seize power in the first place are beginning to have a significantly less influential effect upon the Purgation populace as before, due in large part to changing social and political conditions in the country.

The PNL's rhetoric of palingenetic ultra-nationalism and a promised national re-birth and reincarnation was attractive precisely due to the unique social and political conditions of the 1980s. It was a perfect storm of stagflationary crises, a Great Recession causing a spike in unemployment and youth unemployment, a sharp rise in violent crime and inner-city syndicated offences, a country paralysed and unable to respond to the economic crisis due to an unsustainable budget deficit, high interest rates in the lending market, coupled with a rise in political violence, communist insurgency, and Islamic fundamentalism. The social conditions of that time were a perfect breeding-ground for reactionary sentiments amongst the wider populace. The PNL party cast the blame for the country's crisis on various groups that were in the national consciousness at the time - terrorists, insurgents, criminals, 'work-shy' vagrants, 'moochers' burdening the welfare state, and so on - as parasitical elements contributing to national decline and sapping national productivity. The concept of a parasitical sub-class of the population, biologically and genetically inclined to be parasitical by their nature and to burden the rest of the community, such that their identification and suppression would be a 'quick-fix' to the country's many social and economic problems, was an attractive message at the time to many persons. After more than three decades of PNL one-party rule, however, the circumstances are quite different. The PNL regime has had the opportunity to identify and suppress the 'parasitical' elements of the community for a long time now, criminal syndicates were stomped out with the brutal and widespread application of state violence, criminal immigrants were summarily deported and the country's borders were closed to migrants from so-called 'high-crime countries of origin', various religious minorities were intimidated and suppressed, and of course, over 350 million Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel persons have been identified and sent to 'liquidation facilities' to be exterminated through 'liquidation through labour'. In other words, most of the so-called 'parasitical elements' of the Purgation community have been identified and suppressed by the PNL government, rendering it necessarily harder for the PNL regime to blame the country's future social and economic problems on the parasitical burdensome influence of the 'genetically disordered' elements of the community.

This does not mean, of course, that the PNL-aligned media outlets do not continue to publish propaganda to the Purgation public, demonising various 'hostile forces' detrimental to national welfare and well-being. In the current age, PNL-friendly media companies generally target three groups for such demonising rhetoric. First, there are the so-called Gene Traitors, people who breach and violate PO 344/1999, the PICOS decree which required the mandatory abortion and euthanasia of Dysfonctionnel foetuses and newborn infants (identified through compulsory genetic testing in hospitals and maternity wards) and the mandatory sterilisation of persons who had produced more than three Dysfonctionnel offspring in their lifetime. Such persons may include parents who deliberately conceal the existence of their Dysfonctionnel offspring or medical staff at various hospitals who intentionally aid and abet such concealment by refusing to record the results of a genetic test or even falsifying the results at the patient's urging. The actions of these Gene Traitors, when uncovered by PICOS or the PPF, are generally amplified in the media, with a significant focus being placed on the dangerous and fraudulent nature of their conduct. For example, in 2020, there was a strong media fixation on the case of the nurse Caroline Dormoy, who was found to have strong Catholic convictions against performing abortions and euthanasia, and consequently concealed around 13 foetal Dysfonctionnel genetic results from her superiors by falsely recording their results as Sain in the hospital's official records, before being caught by one of the doctors who performed a second test on a repeat patient and quickly realised the discrepancy in the results. Throughout the year, Purgation right-wing media outlets focussed on the 'case of Caroline Dormoy' as evidence of a broader trend of medical staff conspiring and colluding to frustrate the PNL government's eugenic policies, coupled with wild conjecture and speculation from news anchors or op-ed columnists suggesting that there may be millions of Dysfonctionnel newborns across the nation who were hidden and concealed and went on to commit crimes, run drugs, and burden social services all because the country's medical staff were colluding with parents to frustrate PO 344/1999 and further harm and detriment the quality of the nation's gene-pool.

Second, the Purgation media also fixates upon the existing remnants of the Genetic Equality Movement (GEM), which still exists to the present day, and engages in small-scale fighting against the PAF and other pro-government forces, although the extent and intensity of the fighting is nowhere close to that of the Purgation civil war against the GEM insurgency back in 1990-2000. Nevertheless, the GEM continues to be the largest and most robust opposition force to the ruling PNL government in the country, and its fighters are united only by their common disdain for the ruling regime, spanning a wide ideological spectrum from communists, socialists, anarchists, social democrats, liberals, nationalists in the seven formerly independent Occupied Territories, and other segments of the populace who may be strongly opposed to the eugenic or genetically discriminatory policies of the PNL ruling party (whether because they are Dysfonctionnel themselves, or have Dysfonctionnel friends or family, or have conscientious objections to the continued persecution and genocidal extermination of the Dysfonctionnel) and are motivated enough to risk their lives by taking up arms against the present regime. While there is no ongoing widespread guerrilla war against the GEM in the cantons of Villehardouin and Lusignan as it was throughout the 1990s, the GEM does still successfully launch 'lone-wolf' terrorist attacks upon the concentrated urban areas under PNL control, including the famous 2015 Poisson train station massacre involving a bombing of a metropolitan railway station that killed 15 civilians, the 2018 Limogens street marketplace attack involving two 'car bombs' set off in a crowded marketplace killing 24 civilians and wounding hundreds of others, and the 2020 bombing of a joint PIGC-Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac research laboratory that was in the process of being constructed in Lyons which killed 3 PIGC research scientists, 2 PPF Police officers, and 9 construction workers. PNL propaganda typically emphasises such attacks and reminds ordinary citizens of the threat of future such terrorist attacks to drive home the message that the PNL regime's 'tough on crime', 'tough on terrorism' policies and its eugenic approach of preventatively identifying, detaining, and 'liquidating' the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel are the only way to prevent the Dysfonctionnel from raining down significantly greater destruction and devastation upon the ordinary civilian populace.

by **Purgatio** » Sat Aug 26, 2023 1:48 am

And finally, the most frequently utilised propaganda tactic of the PNL and PNL-aligned media is to direct the populace's attention outwards to foreign countries and overseas Dysfonctionnel persons. PNL-friendly media outlets like the Halcyon News Network (HNN), Les Potins du Matin, La Voix du Royaume, and La Petite Auxiliorienne have generally focussed and fixated upon the actions of foreign countries to portray all foreign nations as 'dysgenic hellholes' that have permitted the contaminating and destructive influences of the Dysfonctionnel to run wild and rampant in their own polities, contaminating and polluting the bloodlines of the local populace and terrorising ordinary citizens with crime, terrorism, insurgency, and other such 'parasitical' behaviours, resulting in the Purgation State's populace (both the seven provinces in the heartland and the seven occupied zones) being the only 'genetically clean', 'genetically pure' population group left in the entire world. Consequently, non-Purgation nations are portrayed as Dysfonctionnel countries, nations dominated and controlled by the Dysfonctionnel and held hostage to their parasitical and destructive tendencies, which, if left unchecked, threaten to overrun and destroy the Purgation nation and her people. Pro-PNL propaganda fixates in particular upon the actions of the Animirian government in New Hanseatian and the Stulitian government in Glavanská and their continued funding and support for the GEM insurgency as evidence of the 'Hanseatian Dysfonctionnel clique' and 'Glavanská Dysfonctionnel cabal' controlling those societies and plotting to undermine the Purgation people by overthrowing her present regime, replacing it with a Dysfonctionnel-controlled regime, reversing the present government's anti-Dysfonctionnel policies, in order to allow the Dysfonctionnel to run wild again, rampaging unchecked across Purgation society and destroying the 'genetically clean' and 'biologically productive' tendencies of the rest of the populace through inter-breeding, to control, exploit, and profit off of the average productive Purgation with their parasitical criminality, vagrancy, terrorism, and syndicated racketeering.

To further entrench the PNL government's propagandist messaging about the existential threat allegedly posed by the foreign Dysfonctionnel to the security and stability of the Purgation State and the impending destruction and devastation which the Dysfonctionnel-controlled foreign nations seek to visit upon the Purgation populace to pollute and contaminate the local gene-pool, destroy her distinct bloodlines, and dominate and control the Purgation people once more with uncontrolled Dysfonctionnel parasitism (as it was said to be before the PNL came to power), the PIGC laboratory in Ravaliér has been engaged in an ongoing high-profile research project, in conjunction with the PAF military, which has been hyped up in the Purgation media since 2018 and is often referred to as Les Érinnyes s'Abattront (short for les Érinnyes s'abattront sur chacun d'eux! or 'the Furies shall descend upon them all'). The PIGC's public messaging about Les Érinnyes s'Abattront has been that the project's ultimate aim is to use 'nanophage technologies' to invent an artificially engineered virus which can target genetic sequences or alleles which are statistically significantly more likely to be present in someone classified as Dysfonctionnel and less likely to be present in someone classified as Sain, in other words, a so-called 'racial biogenetic bioweapon' that can be deployed or released into the environments of Purgatio's foreign enemies in order to 'facilitate a quick and efficient mass elimination of the Dysfonctionnel threat before that invidious menace comes to consume and inundate our country, destroy our people, and visit devastation upon the integrity of our body politic'. There has been significant domestic and international speculation about the PIGC's Les Érinnyes s'Abattront programme (the details of which are protected behind a 'Top Secret' military and security classification, that being the highest possible level of security classification in the PAF, PSS, and PIA), with questions ranging from whether the program is actually real or just fabricated as a governmental propagandist effort to distract the populace, how much progress the researchers have made in the past few years, whether the project's aims are scientifically possible or not, whether the Purgation government actually intends to ever use or deploy the project on foreign nations or if the regime simply wants to possess the weapon as a deterrent measure or a tool to back up the regime's sabre-rattling rhetoric to pander to its more jingoistic ultra-nationalistic supporters, and so on. Whatever the truth may be, the PIGC's announced intentions to create such a 'racial biogenetic bioweapon' have caused considerable alarm to many foreign nations, especially the Animirian government in New Hanseatian and the Stulitian government in Glavanská, with many hawkish politicians in Purgatio's neighbours often advocating for a pre-emptive strike to defeat the PNL regime before it can successfully complete the desired research project. Both the sabre-rattling rhetoric of these neighbouring politicians, and the stated aims of the PIGC's Les Érinnyes s'Abattront research project, are often utilised by PNL politicians and PNL-aligned media outlets to appeal to more jingoistic and ultra-nationalistic segments of the Purgation populace, to paint foreign nations - especially Purgatio's immediate neighbours in New Hanseatian and Glavanská - as fundamentally 'disordered', dominated by the out-of-control Dysfonctionnel, and hell-bent on destroying the Purgation body national, necessitating the continued rule of the PNL regime to maintain the strength and order of the Purgation nation and protect the Purgation people from her enemies, who are funding and supporting opposition forces like the GEM to tear the nation apart and destroy her from within by stoking internal conflict, chaos, and turmoil.

Despite the application of these propagandist tactics, the Purgation populace remains deeply divided along cultural, generational, and socio-economic lines, and support for the ruling PNL regime has wavered significantly amongst specific demographics of the nation, constituting a serious and credible threat to the stability of the present government and the longevity of the PNL party's continued hold onto autocratic political power. Faith and confidence in the PNL regime is significantly lower amongst the younger generations, especially the 18-35 year old demographic, largely on account of the fact that the under-35s grew up in a world in which the PNL regime was the only form of government they knew. The chaos and instability of the Great Recession and its accompanying economic turmoil and normalised political violence between communists and fascists were long over by the time this generation was in their late teenage or young adult years. Thus, for many young people in Purgatio, the PNL regime is not a radical modernising force that transformed the nation in a period of crisis, nor a stabilising agent that rescued the country from economic turmoil and socio-political conflict and instability that threatened to tear the society apart - rather, the PNL regime is the only government that has controlled the nation for more than three decades, practically throughout the entire lifetime of this generation. Far from being a radical force of change or traditional beacon of stability, the PNL regime is viewed by a substantial proportion of young people as the architect of the present challenges facing the nation - growing income inequality, calcifying wealth inequality, the fall in social mobility, the loss of opportunities for upward social mobility for lower-class and middle-class youngsters who must resign themselves to holding jobs and enjoying a similar standard of living to that of their parents or worse, police brutality, absence of the rule of law or checks and balance on the arbitrary power of various state institutions to prevent abuses by PICOS officers or Purification Order paramilitary soldiers, the terrifying prospect of 'genetic re-classification' by the TECON-TECAT tribunals, the monopolisation of top leadership positions in political and cultural life by the aristocratic Les Enfants du Ciel elite families, the absence of democracy, privacy rights, or any other civil liberties, the country's poor international reputation and hostile relations with all her neighbours, loss of independence and sovereignty for the colonised Occupied Territories, and so on, all can be laid at the feet of the PNL one-party state.

This is not to say that all Purgation young people are anti-government or hold views opposed to the present PNL regime. After all, the under-35 generation is also the same generation which has been through the country's education system following the PNL's takeover of 1987-1988, including the insertion of various pro-PNL ideological propaganda into schools, including the teaching of eugenic, genetically deterministic, and socially Darwinistic views of Mandatum Est or Geneviève Aumont's La Solution Finale as part of so-called 'Genetic Integrity Education'. There is therefore a substantial proportion of Purgation young people who are within the 18-35 year old demographic who are deeply devout adherents of the Mandatum Est belief system and zealous proponents of the present PNL regime and its autocratic, fascistic ideology. Many of these young people tend to hail from more conservative or reactionary households, and many of them tend to be in the upper-class or the middle-class, and therefore more likely to sympathise with the PNL regime's philosophy, its naturalistic and hierarchical worldview, and the current system's thinly-veiled classist disdain for so-called 'lower class' traits and tendencies (criminality, vagrancy, mooching, etc.) and demonisation of socialist and communist beliefs as harbingers of chaos, poverty, turmoil, and endless anarchy. Many such young people will often join the Purification Order Youth Brigade or the PIGC 'Young Researchers' internship programme, geared towards teenagers, and many of them will have ambitions to hold future positions of power or influence in the more ideologically-driven organs of state, such as PICOS, the PIGC, and the Purification Order. However, many other Purgation young people within the under-35 demographic, especially those within the lower-class or even the middle-class, are deeply disillusioned with the current PNL regime, the injustices of the social inequality in their society, and the perceived lack of opportunities for advancement and social mobility, and the more radical of such young people may even be drawn to liberal, leftist, socialist, or communist beliefs, having been exposed to alternative worldviews and foreign perspectives on Purgatio due to the advent of the Internet, the Information Age, and the limited power of the government to block or censor dissident or politically sensitive information transmitted online. Most such young people may be apathetic about politics, hold hostile or oppositional views towards the present government, and a small minority may be radical enough to organise underground anti-government youth groups, spread or disseminate anti-PNL publications in secret over the 'Dark Web', and an even more radical minority may take up arms against the regime by fleeing to the outlying regions of the country (where governmental control and surveillance is generally weaker) to join the ongoing GEM insurgency against the ruling regime.

In contrast, support for the PNL regime is generally higher amongst the demographic which were adults when the PNL regime came to power in 1987-1988, who are presently in their late forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, or early eighties. This was the demographic which experienced the Great Recession, the political violence, chaos, and turmoil of Les Années de Sang et de Plomb, the post-depression uptick in violent crime in the late 1980s, and the economic recovery and decline in violent and syndicated crime in the inner-cities following the PNL's rise to power. This was the age demographic which brought the PNL regime to power, and many of the members of this generation still view the PNL regime as the government which brought order, stability, and peace to an impoverished, chaotic, and disunified nation that was on the brink of social disintegration and catastrophic collapse into disorder and infighting in the late 1980s. PNL propagandist narratives about the dangers of the Dysfonctionnel undermining social harmony and the prosperity and security of the Purgation people have generally held much more sway within the demographic responsible for bringing the PNL to power to begin with. There remains, however, a radical minority within even this demographic which oppose the PNL regime, especially those who opposed the PNL regime during its coup d'état, its takeover and dismantling of liberal democracy, such as those who supported the socialist CPP or who fought the PAF military in the GEM insurgency at the height of that civil war back in 1990-2000. Such persons have undoubtedly held onto their radical beliefs and staunch opposition to the present regime - especially left-wing members of the working-class - and that opposition has certainly not faded over the years, with many remaining militants and insurgent fighters within the GEM to this day.

This highlights another critical fault line in Purgation society that is only getting worse, especially in a society as rigidly stratified and economically unequal as PNL Purgation society, and that is class. The socio-economic class one is born into makes a huge difference in the views one holds towards the PNL regime. Generally speaking, members of the Purgation upper-class, both young and old alike, tend to have more positive feelings or supportive views of the current PNL regime, although this is, of course, not universally true. This includes not just the elite few households in the Les Enfants du Ciel high-placed aristocratic strata, but the upper-class more generally, a so-called 'financial aristocracy' of bourgeois multi-millionaires and billionaires (approximately about 1-3% of all households) whose families own and control substantial amounts of liquid financial capital capable of being invested into the Purgation economy (large enough to live off of the capital income alone), and making huge returns on the 'concession contracts' linked to the slave labour of the Dysfonctionnel or the wider economy of financial derivatives and other carefully packaged and meticulously structured des profits à prendre financial products tied or linked, ultimately, to the profits of those 'concession contracts', capable of earning large profits both because of the brutality of the PNL regime in its exploitation and extermination of the Dysfonctionnel and the capital-friendly approach of its tax system which largely exempts most capital sources of income from any taxation whatsoever. This upper class benefits handsomely from the present regime's corporatistic, anti-communist policies, its capital-friendly tax structure, its brutal suppression of the labour movement and cultivation of false consciousness through the scapegoating of Dysfonctionnel persons and Dysfonctionnel-controlled foreign countries as being ultimately to blame for the country's social and economic problems, but most of all, this upper class of coupon-clipping rentiers benefit from their enjoyment of economically privileged lives of inherited capital and substantial capital incomes from rents, dividends, and interests, which in turn depend upon the ongoing violence and brutality of the present PNL regime to maintain their present privileges in society, especially its continued genocidal extermination of the Dysfonctionnel through 'liquidation through labour' which allows the upper class to profit handsomely from the slave labour of the victims of that campaign. Without the PNL regime's autocratic fascistic rule, the position and power of this class would be immediately threatened and their status in society would be endangered and thrown into jeopardy.

The position becomes more complicated, however, for the middle-class and lower-class. It is, of course, quite trite that from a purely Marxist perspective, there is certainly no real material distinction between the two classes, at least when looked at solely and strictly in terms of their relationship to the means of production (i.e., as wage labourers). However, from a socio-cultural perspective, there is certainly a distinction between how the middle-class and lower-class perceive themselves, each other, and their role and position in society vis-à-vis the other. The middle-class (which may broadly be defined as the so-called 'mass affluent' class, the class that has access to a healthy amount of liquid financial capital to invest, like somewhere upwards of US$100,000 or above, with stable, well-paid employment in 'prestigious' positions such as the licensed professions, higher ranks of the civil service, or the upper-to-middle management of a company's leadership, and access to good-quality education for their children and a university degree for themselves, amongst other 'class markers', making up roughly around 22-28% of all Purgation households depending on one's preferred economic or sociological definition of class) occupies a complex and interstitial position within the Purgation socio-cultural hierarchy. It is no exaggeration to say that the Purgation middle-class is, in large part, responsible for bringing the PNL party to power in its coup of 1987-1988, with a substantial majority of middle-class households flocking to the PNL party during the elections of 1987 and thereafter. The reasons for this middle-class 'flight' to the PNL and attraction towards Purgation fascism are varied - fear of communism, anxiety over their slipping class status during the Great Recession, panic over the recent uptick in violent crime and syndicated offences, and fear and anxiety over the increasing boldness and radicalism of the lower classes (represented by an uptick in socialist and communist agitation), which made the PNL's demonisation of the lower-class through rhetoric aimed at behaviours culturally associated with the lower-class (criminality, 'work-shy' vagrancy, mooching off of welfare, substance addiction, etc.) particularly attractive to the middle-class as it appealed to that class's members' heightened anxieties about their slipping economic status and the rising agitation and radicalisation of the nation's poor and working-class at the time.

Now, more than three decades later, the middle-class is the most polarised of the three social classes. Many members of the middle-class, especially the older and more conservative members, remain just as supportive of the PNL government as they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For these middle-class denizens, the recent social trends of growing support for the GEM insurgency (especially amongst the Purgation youth) and worsening social inequality has triggered and sharply heightened many of the same reactionary anxieties that beset the Purgation middle-class in the 1980s - namely, a fear of a lower-class uprising and the violent dispossession and deprivation of middle-class privileges over the lower-class, which are presently kept under 'control' by the PNL's brutal tactics of the over-policing of poor neighbourhoods and the threat of potential 'genetic re-classification' for members of the lower-class found to engage in criminality, insurgency, terrorism, sedition, and so on. For many conservative and reactionary members of the middle-class, the dispossession of the PNL from power would be followed by a subsequent dispossession of themselves from the middle-class by a rowdy, raucous, and out-of-control lower-class, the criminality and violence of which would no longer be kept under control or suppressed by the PNL's over-policing and 'liquidation facilities'. These conservative-minded members of the middle-class are more likely to be attracted to the PNL's political rhetoric about the critical importance of maintaining the regime's hardline approach towards the Dysfonctionnel, and will naturally associate the so-called Dysfonctionnel behaviours and tendencies that are constantly demonised by the PNL and PNL-aligned media outlets (i.e., criminality, vagrancy, mooching, etc.) with the poor and the lower-class to begin with. As class-based tensions increase under the calcifying inequalities of PNL Purgation rule, many conservative anxieties and insecurities of the middle-class come to be triggered and accentuated as a result, and consequently drawing them to the rhetoric of the PNL regime.

However, there is another segment of the middle-class, especially amongst the younger generation who have only ever known PNL rule in Purgatio, whose fears and resentments are not targeted at the lower-class and the Dysfonctionnel, but at the upper class, the entrenched Les Enfants du Ciel aristocratic elite, and by extension, the ruling PNL regime responsible for maintaining and preserving the inherited privileges of that stratospheric social class. As social mobility and opportunity continues to decline in an increasingly stratified Purgation economy built upon the rentier profits of capital investment into the slave labour of the Dysfonctionnel and the 'liquidation facilities', many middle-class young people in Purgatio have increasingly directed their ire and fury at the perceived deprivation of opportunities for advancement resulting from the PNL oligarchical elite's continued domination and monopolisation of political and economic power in the country, and the PNL regime's preservation of the economic and social privileges of the upper-class bourgeoisie. Many of these Purgation middle-class young people have become increasingly drawn to anti-fascistic, anti-autocratic, anti-government ideas percolating on the Internet or culturally imported into Purgatio from abroad in an increasingly digital, online, and globalised world. A substantial number of them have become attracted to liberal ideas, to human rights, liberal democracy, and constitutional republicanism. A smaller and more radical group have even begun flirting with more left-wing, socialist ideas, and the more motivated and antagonistic of them have even gone so far as to join the GEM insurgency to take up arms against the present regime with an eye towards displacing the PNL elite from power by force, with the less radical, less risk-taking members forming secret underground youth groups like the Students' Association for a Democratic Purgatio (SADP) and the Purgation Youth Coalition for Democratisation (PYCD), sharing ideas and spreading liberal and pro-democracy views over the Dark Web or in discreet and furtive in-person meetings. The result is a polarised and divided middle-class, and depending on one's cultural outlook and generational qualities, a middle-class denizen may either be drawn towards maintaining the PNL's grip on power out of terror and anxiety over the lower-class and a feared dispossession and loss of one's class status by the increasingly restless and radicalised urban poor, or drawn towards anti-government views out of frustration for the present PNL regime, a distaste for its brutal tactics, deprivation of human rights, and fascistic autocratic dictatorial style of governing, and most of all, anger and frustration at the Purgation upper-class and its perceived monopolisation of political, social, and economic privileges in a stratified Purgation society in which wealth and capital returns from the Dysfonctionnel 'rentier slave economy' is hoarded by a tiny elite and an oligarchical clique keeping the present PNL regime in power.

Finally, the picture becomes even more complex still when one turns to the largest social class in the country, that is, the Purgation lower-class, which may broadly be understood as encompassing the rest of the population (approximately 70-77% of the population, depending on the sociological definition one uses to define the 'upper-class', 'middle-class', and 'lower-class' based on a combination of economic and socio-cultural characteristics). While the Purgation lower-class (sometimes referred to as the 'working-class' as a cultural euphemism) is certainly a diverse and variegated group which cannot be reductively homogenised, a characteristic that is broadly present in most Purgation lower-class households is an absence of access to substantial amounts of financial capital that can be invested into the Purgation capital market to profit, directly or indirectly, from the rentier 'slave economy' of the Dysfonctionnel 'liquidation through labour' genocidal project of the PNL regime. In a financial capitalist economy that is becoming increasingly stratified and immobile - especially a rentier economy dependent upon capital returns from slave labour - this absence of substantial investible liquid capital is perhaps the most critical distinguishing factor between the 'lower class' and the comparative power and privilege of the 'middle class' and 'upper class' of the country, which can (to varying degrees) profit from the capital returns that are derived from the nation's so-called 'rentier-genocidal' economic structure as erected and maintained through PNL rule.

Socio-economically speaking, the Purgation lower-class has, by and large, suffered immensely under the rule of the PNL one-party state, and its economic fortunes have declined substantially throughout the over three decades of PNL fascistic governance. The PNL's demonising rhetoric against the Dysfonctionnel was rooted in very thinly-veiled classism, engendered by the inter-class anxieties of the 1980s amidst growing support for left-wing socialistic ideals and the radical political violence and terrorism of the communist CPP and L'Épée du Peuple under the chaos and fractious turmoil of Les Années de Sang et de Plomb. Under the pretext of anti-communist purges, followed by anti-Dysfonctionnel purges thereafter, the PNL's policies have substantially destroyed the fortunes of the lower-class, through the brutal suppression of the labour movement, the destruction of independent trade unions and forcible incorporation of the organised labour movement under a State-sanctioned trade union (L'Association Nationale des Travailleurs or ANT which is prohibited from striking or engaging in any industrial action whatsoever and has to co-operate and work with a national association of PNL-aligned, government-friendly corporations, employers, and enterprises organised under La Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie or CCI, in a corporatistic and class-collaborationist economic model), hollowing-out the capacity of the Purgation lower-class to advocate for itself and using brutal State violence to crush and destroy the growing left-wing radicalism of Purgation workers.

Once that key political project was complete, the PNL's 'war on crime' and 'law and order' policies followed by its violent purges of persons classified as Dysfonctionnel did further damage to an already-battered 'lower class', resulting in the mass detention and enslavement of many members of the lower-class identified by PPF Police officers or PICOS troopers and officers as 'criminals', 'gangsters', 'vagrants', 'vagabonds', 'work-shy', 'mooching parasites', and so on. The demonisation of long-term unemployment as 'work-shy vagrancy' and long-term welfare dependency as 'mooching' or 'parasitism' reinforced a pre-existing powerful cultural stigma against poverty and homelessness, and as more impoverished Purgations were detained and tossed into 'liquidation facilities' under the guise of rooting-out 'parasitism' and 'genetically disordered traits' within the populace, impoverished and deprived neighbourhoods came under intense policing and surveillance. It has been estimated that anywhere between around 93-98% of persons classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel were drawn from the Purgation lower-class, which is not surprising given the strong correlation between many of the demonised traits (criminality, vagrancy, welfare dependency, substance-abuse, etc.) and poverty. Lower-income neighbourhoods suffered from the economic deprivations of the loss of many of their members, and the consequent wage-repressive effects of having to compete with the exploited industrial labour of the now-enslaved Dysfonctionnel forced to work against their will in 'liquidation facilities'. The PNL regime was beholden to a small clique of wealthy benefactors who profited from the regime's genocidal policies through 'concession contracts' and derivative des profits à prendre financial products, and so, in turn, used their power and influence to sustain the regime's hold on power, which meant that the government's various social projects including the erection of the national DNA database, the expansion of the armed forces, the militarisation of the police, and the establishment of a mass surveillance apparatus, were paid for not through tax increases on the upper classes, but a mixture of mass privatisation of public services (coupled with attendant increases in tariff rates which took a disproportionate toll on the lower-class), the gutting of social services, the enslavement and exploitation of the Dysfonctionnel, the abolition of the minimum wage and the liberalisation of many other labour and industrial regulations in an effort to reduce production costs and 'free up' the labour market (so as to keep low-skilled manufacturing and industrial work 'price competitive' with the slave labour economy of 'concession contracts' over 'liquidation facilities'), in order to keep capital untaxed and income taxed at low rates to appease the upper-class and the middle-class of the country, but at the expense of the lower-class.

It is hence no exaggeration to state that the lower-class has suffered immensely under the policies of the PNL regime. By and large, persons born into this social strata do not and will not be able to obtain a university degree, making it difficult for them to attain employment in anything but low-skilled manufacturing work or menial service or clerical labour which has to compete directly in the marketplace with the cheap and easily exploitable slave labour of the Dysfonctionnel. Members of the lower-class do not have economic security or job security, are easily replaced by 'slave labour' or the surplus labour of other unemployed members of the lower-class, and cannot depend upon social assistance or charity to alleviate periods of financial distress due to the overwhelming cultural stigma against so-called 'parasitism', 'mooching', and 'leeching' off of 'more productive' members of society, and the ever-present threat that if one is found to be a homeless 'vagrant' or a 'moocher' who is not self-reliant or self-sufficient for a prolonged period of time, one could face 'genetic re-classification' before the TECON-TECAT tribunal system, if the tribunal judges deem one's prolonged poverty to be reflective of an innate and broader 'parasitical disposition', prompting many impoverished or struggling members of the lower-class to hide and conceal the extent of their financial troubles and avoid seeking help or social assistance. Members of the lower-class who end up committing crimes out of financial desperation, such as stealing basic necessities or running and dealing drugs to earn money, risk being arrested by PPF or PICOS officers and suffering 're-classification' as Dysfonctionnel and genocidal enslavement as a result. Most members of the lower-class live a hand-to-mouth existence, living from paycheque to paycheque, having to work multiple part-time jobs on 'zero-hour contracts' or 'moonlight' by performing odd-jobs or other ad hoc labour just to make ends meet. Most members of the lower-class have few financial savings, the overwhelming majority are tenants in rental accommodation and have no access to wealth, be it home equity or mutual funds or retirement accounts or other stock portfolios, locked out of the Purgation capital market by virtue of their lack of investible liquid financial capital to benefit from the PNL Purgation 'rentier-genocidal' economy. The national unemployment rate is on the slightly higher side, hovering between 8% on the low end and 14% on the high end, largely attributable to the Purgation 'slave labour' economic model which has the effect of making many low-skilled labourers redundant in the workforce, meaning that amongst the lower-class, the percentage of unemployed persons at any one point in time tends to be around one-sixth of all lower-class individuals, making for a transient, economically insecure, and extremely financially unstable or precarious existence. Over 27% of the total population - approximately one-fifth of the so-called 'lower class', not including the enslaved Dysfonctionnel - live below the oft-used international poverty line of having access to less than US$6.85 a day.

Many members of the Purgation lower-class are, consequently, politically apathetic, highly socially disaffected, and bear a general outlook on life that can be described as cynical and largely resigned to the reality of the world they inhabit. Most lower-class individuals do not pay attention to politics or care about socio-political affairs due to the cultivation of a psychological 'scarcity mentality', in which their focus is, necessarily, fixated solely and exclusively upon immediate, short-term, day-to-day concerns, due to the absence of job stability and the economic insecurity of having to live paycheque-to-paycheque with few to no savings to rely upon. While the disgruntled and disaffected majority of the lower-class may be 'harmless' to the stability of the present PNL socio-political order on most occasions, owing to their general political apathy and unwillingness to dedicate precious time, labour, resources, and mental energies to political affairs or plotting and strategising a revolution, nevertheless it makes for an unstable set of circumstances in times of economic crisis or recession, in which an uptick of riotous, looting, and disorderly conduct amongst the lower-class (and especially the urban poor in deprived neighbourhoods) becomes a real concern for law enforcement and the armed forces. Nonetheless, apart from such incidents of generally aimless looting and short-term riotous activities via largely unorganised and spontaneous bouts of public hooliganism and street brawling and scuffling, this disaffected and cynical majority of the lower-class do not generally pose a threat to the PNL's hold onto power in the Purgation State due to their broad political apathy, short-term oriented 'scarcity mentality', absence of access to higher educational or intellectual resources, and lack of broader organised revolutionary action.

Amongst the substantial minority of lower-class persons who are politically motivated, however, it is unsurprising that the ideology which attracts these lower-class individuals the most is left-wing socialist ideas, especially socialism, communism, and anarchism. Amongst the most radicalised and politically motivated members of the lower-class, antipathy and hostility against the ruling PNL regime is extremely high, especially amongst lower-class young people who tend to view the PNL regime with extreme acrimony and disdain, blaming the ruling government for oppressing and persecuting the lower-class to enrich themselves and their upper-class bourgeois oligarchy and the financial aristocracy upon which they rely to maintain their grip on power. The overwhelming majority of new recruits who flock to the ranks of the GEM insurgency are drawn from the lower-class, especially young members of the lower-class. A distinctive difference is that while young middle-class Purgations who are generally drawn to anti-government views tend to be more attracted to liberalism and pro-democracy or pro-republican ideals (secretly joining groups like SADP and PYCD which largely dominate the college campus activist scene in the country), young lower-class Purgations who are anti-government are more likely to reject liberalism and democracy altogether in favour of left-wing socialism, communism, or anarchism instead, making up the most radical members of the GEM and constituting the 'far-left wing' of that growing insurgent movement.

However, there also remains a smaller but nevertheless still substantial minority of the Purgation lower-class which is ideologically motivated and politically engaged, but in the precise opposite direction. These are generally older, more conservative and traditionalist members of the lower-class who do not identify as members of an oppressed or persecuted social class, but consider themselves part of a greater Purgation body-politic or 'national organism' made up of the productive and innately fruitful Génétiquement Sain, with a unified common biological-genetical interest against the parasitical and disordered tendencies of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel. These members of the lower-class disdain criminality, insurgency, vandalism, vagrancy, 'work-shy' indolence and the 'parasitism' of 'mooching' or welfare dependency, viewing themselves as fundamentally biologically distinct from - and superior to - such members of the lower-class, who are not 'fellow members' of the lower-class, but dangerous parasitical enemies of the Dysfonctionnel whose tendencies destroyed the health and vitality of the Purgation national community in the past, and threaten to do so in future if left unchecked by the Sain. Instead of holding the PNL regime responsible for the economic plight of the lower-class, these more conservative and reactionary-minded members of the lower-class blame the country's ills upon internal Gene Traitors frustrating the continued genetic improvement of the Purgation people, the still un-liquidated Dysfonctionnel be it common urban criminals and gangsters or militant insurgents within the GEM, and most of all, foreign nations (especially Purgatio's neighbours in the Animirian Federation and People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia) which are dominated and controlled by the parasitical Dysfonctionnel by virtue of centuries of unchecked dysgenics and their non-adoption of eugenic or genetically discriminatory policies such as that of the PNL regime, resulting in a 'polluted', 'contaminated', and 'degraded' gene-pool with an innate 'parasitical drive' to destroy the strength and vitality of the Purgation nation and the purity of the Purgation people. These members of the lower-class are also the most likely to be drawn to the rhetoric of the PNL regime or that of PNL-aligned media outlets which demonise so-called Dysfonctionnel foreign nations and governments as well as illegal immigrants or migrants from such nations that enter Purgatio through irregular avenues for 'polluting' the local gene-pool, contributing to gang and drug-related criminality, and depressing the wages of Purgatio's lowest-paid workers through unlawful and undocumented labour. Many of them will also regard as inspirational and aspirational the 'rags to riches' journeys of prominent members of the PNL ruling elite, such as Justice Secretary Devona Moreau and Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet, as well as hardliner extremist Purification Order leaders like Louis Paradis and Nicolas Charlet, who all famously hailed from poor and deprived lower-class backgrounds but rose up to become extremely wealthy and privileged members of the PNL political and economic elite, stories which are repeatedly highlighted in pro-PNL propaganda. Many of these lower-class members are from the older generation, would have been former members of their local anti-communist volontaires auxiliaires or at least supported their brutal vigilante tactics, and most of them would take up jobs as PAF soldiers, PICOS troopers or concentration camp guards, Purification Order paramilitaries, constables or 'beat cops' in the Purgation Police Force (PPF), or rank-and-file party activists within the PNL, assisting the party's propaganda efforts through grassroots campaigning, organising rallies and demonstrations, or local neighbourhood canvassing and recruitment drives or the handing out of party leaflets, pamphlets, and fliers spreading PNL propaganda about the dangers of Dysfonctionnel persons and Dysfonctionnel-controlled foreign nations, thereby gaining stable employment and financial stability in the process through the only decently paid and relatively secure work reasonably available to the Purgation lower-class, namely, by the suppression of dissidence and the rooting-out of potential political radicalism within their own class and communities.

And the final fault line between pro-PNL and anti-PNL groups within the Purgation State - which cannot be divorced or separated from the former fault lines of class and age - is that of culture, specifically, one's cultural worldview and outlook, which deserves independent consideration because it determines to a significant extent the degree of one's attraction to the PNL Purgation regime's ideology of Mandatum Est and its prevailing eugenic, genetically-deterministic, socially Darwinistic 'survival of the fittest' worldview, and its demonisation and stigmatisation of so-called 'parasitical', 'disordered', and Dysfonctionnel traits and qualities. Much of the PNL's prevailing ideology and rhetoric against the dangers of the Dysfonctionnel rests upon a culturally traditionalist and socially conservative worldview which shuns and disdains a whole host of 'immoral', 'improper', and 'shameful' behaviours - a disdain of rowdy, rebellious, riotous anti-social behaviours which undermine law and order and social harmony, a contempt for perceived laziness and indolence at the expense of hard work, diligence, and individual productivity, a disgust for perceived incontinence and inability to control one's base urges and vulgar instincts and impulses, manifesting in 'smash and grab' criminality, indolent welfare dependency, persistent 'voluntary' unemployment or 'elective' homelessness and vagrancy, or chronic substance abuse and addiction to the point of an inability to work, be productive, or contribute fruitfully to society. The Mandatum Est worldview and the segregation of the Sain and Dysfonctionnel rests upon many traditionalist prejudices against, for example, juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock conception, poor academic performance, high school dropouts, 'wanderer' or 'vagabond' lifestyles, persistent drug abuse, prolonged absence from the workforce, and other perceived deviant lifestyles and anti-social behaviours generally held in disdain by more conservative, traditionalist, or reactionary elements of the community.

Such conservative attitudes are generally more common amongst the older generation in Purgatio. Amongst the younger generation, however, many such prejudices are often viewed by many as overly repressive, antiquated, and even bigoted or close-minded, such as the moral prejudices against recreational drug use, 'illegitimate' out-of-wedlock procreation, or the blaming of criminality, delinquency, unemployment, or poor academic performance solely upon the individual concerned as a matter of personal responsibility as opposed to being attributable to structural causes or systemic obstacles. Many more liberal-minded Purgations are thus more likely to view the types of persons stigmatised by the Mandatum Est belief system and the Sain-Dysfonctionnel distinction as victims in need of help and assistance rather than 'parasites' to be demonised and suppressed, and would perceive the present system to be unfair and unjust to the persons stigmatised as 'genetically disordered' or Dysfonctionnel. These changing beliefs are influenced, to a large extent, by the advent of the Internet, of the Information Age, and the influence of foreign cultures and the importation of more liberal-minded and inclusive norms and mores from other countries. Hence, this conservative-liberal cultural divide correlates strongly to the broader generational divide in Purgatio, with older generations being more likely to hold conservative views and with younger generations more likely to hold liberal views on these various socio-cultural topics. There is also a strong correlation with religion as well, with adherents of the Mandatum Est faith and more traditionalist conservative Catholics being more likely to be culturally conservative, whereas self-proclaimed atheists, agnostics, secular humanists (and other such irreligious groups) along with the more liberal and progressive-minded Catholics being generally more likely to hold comparatively culturally liberal beliefs instead. Lastly, there is a strong classist element to many of these social attitudes, the stigmatisation of delinquency, antisocial behaviour, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity, nicotine addiction, welfare dependency, single-parent households, illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, vagrancy and the so-called 'vagabond' lifestyle, such traits are often culturally associated with poverty and the lower-class more generally. Hence, many of these cultural attitudes find their origins in the mentality and cultural worldview of the Purgation upper-class (more specifically, the 'old money' families in which such attitudes have been winnowed and refined through decades and centuries of multi-generational wealth, navigating an insular elite and rarefied socio-cultural milieu in which such views fester and are reinforced). The Purgation middle-class, by and large, often also attempts to emulate the cultural norms of the upper-class because of the social prestige and cultural capital associated with upper-class families and because emulating the attitudes of the upper-class provides for a 'social barrier' and 'class marker' that distinguishes the middle-class, socio-culturally, from the lower-class, thereby easing some of the class anxieties and insecurities of the middle-class.

In contrast, such culturally conservative attitudes are gradually becoming less prevalent amongst the Purgation lower-class, many of these behaviours are more ubiquitous and commonplace within impoverished and deprived neighbourhoods, de-mystifying such traits and reducing the likelihood of a lower-class Purgation holding stereotypical views of such persons. An increasing number of lower-class Purgations have come to reject the prejudices of the upper-class and middle-class as exclusionary stereotyping and classist and prejudiced against people like themselves, as social opportunity continues to decline in the Purgation economy and the financial circumstances of lower-class families become increasingly unstable and insecure, with more and more lower-class persons coming to slowly recognise the classist, anti-lower-class undertones of such rhetoric against the 'work-shy' vagrants, the 'mooching' and 'leeching' tendencies of welfare dependency, the 'parasitical', 'predatory', 'smash-and-grab mentality' of the common criminal, gangster, vandal, rioter, or juvenile delinquent. This is not to say that culturally conservative attitudes have entirely disappeared from the Purgation lower-class, however, as many of them (especially the older generation, Mandatum Est adherents, or more conservative members of the Catholic faith) may even find comfort in such culturally conservative attitudes because it formally separates them from other more 'deviant' and 'antisocial' members of the lower-class, providing a clear socio-cultural distinction between themselves and the 'parasitical' or 'disordered' elements of their community which are being stigmatised in media and culture more generally. Naturally, there is a strong overlap between this latter segment of the Purgation lower-class and those ideologically motivated Purgations who join the rank-and-file of the PNL, who become Police constables in the PPF, regular soldiers in the PAF, troopers in PICOS or paramilitary soldiers in the Purification Order, or who were former dedicated volunteer fighters in the far-right, anti-communist volontaires auxiliaires during the turmoil and violence of Les Années de Sang et de Plomb. In contrast, younger lower-class and middle-class Purgations are naturally more likely to hold culturally liberal mentalities and to reject the stigmas professed in such culturally conservative attitudes as being bigoted, narrow-minded, or unfairly exclusionary to the persons being stigmatised.

Consequently, the PNL-ruled Purgation State of today is an unstable society in the middle of a great societal schism, with a growing divide between pro-government and anti-government segments of the population, based upon significant fault lines of culture, religion, generation, and socio-economic class status (which correlates, to a large extent, with genetic classification). The PNL regime's hold onto power is far more unstable today than it was in the immediate aftermath of the PNL's successful coup of 1987-1988, attributable to the fact that the social conditions which allowed the PNL to seize power are fading away (the turmoil and chaos of ubiquitous political violence, the stagflation and unemployment of the Great Recession, the sudden uptick in violent and syndicated crime in the late 1980s, the growing popularity and successes of the communist CPP in the 1987 elections which radicalised the Purgation middle-class and upper-class by driving them towards reactionary politics, etc.), and the success of the PNL regime in detaining, enslaving, and liquidating so many Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel has made it much harder to blame all of the country's social and economic problems on that segment of the populace than before, requiring the PNL regime's propagandist tactics to pivot slightly in its narrative to demonise other internal and external enemies (yet-to-be identified Dysfonctionnel, the so-called Gene Traitors hiding and harbouring them, the Dysfonctionnel persons from other countries including illegal immigrants, and foreign nations said to be under the control and the domination of the Dysfonctionnel following centuries of unchecked, un-arrested dysgenics). After three decades of PNL one-party rule, the PNL regime no longer has the advantage of being the 'outsider', the novel untested political force, promising a radical new ideology seeking to usher in sudden change to the political system as a 'quick fix' to the country's social and economic problems, thus presenting a real challenge to the PNL's ideological propaganda efforts. Additionally, many of the fissures of today are attributable to social conditions which have long existed in Purgation society but have been exacerbated by PNL rule, namely, the growing divide between the rich and the poor, the ossification and calcification of wealth inequality, and the swift decline and demise of social mobility and opportunities for economic advancement within the nation, which has engendered significant disenchantment, disillusionment, and disaffection in the present system amongst Purgation young people, and amongst many of the younger generation in the Purgation middle-class and lower-class especially. Only time will tell, however, if the PNL regime is able to cling onto power - although, if the history of fascism and reactionary politics is any indication, the real question is not whether PNL dictatorial rule will end in the Purgation State, but rather when, and more importantly, how.

by **Purgatio** » Mon Aug 28, 2023 7:16 pm

Political Geography of the Purgation State

The territory of the Purgation State consists of an internationally recognised continental heartland which consists of a landmass of approximately 870,215 km² and twelve outlying islands to the north of the Purgation landmass in the Straits of Moñico, consisting of a combined territorial size of 1,252 km² between them. Accordingly, in total, the sovereign territory of the Purgation State (i.e., the territory that is internationally recognised as belonging to the Purgation State, having succeeded to the legal territorial title of the predecessor Republic of Purgatio) consists of a combined territorial size of 871,467 km², in which approximately 1.71 billion persons reside to date.

Additionally, seven former sovereign nations bordering the Purgation State's continental heartland were invaded by the Purgation Armed Forces (PAF) in the First and Second Cleansing Wars, and their territories presently remain under the PAF's military occupation and are subject to the de facto political control of the Purgation State, although the Purgation State is not legally recognised by the broader international community as having any valid legal territorial title to these lands. The seven occupied zones consist of a total landmass of 86,422 km², with approximately 670 million persons residing in these land areas.

Moreover, following the First Cleansing War, the PAF seized control of the border region of Charenne-du-Sud (11,823 km²) from her neighbouring Animirian Federation, and following the Second Cleansing War, the PAF occupied the border region of Lilian-en-Alagnon (9,916 km²) from the Animirian Federation and Meurthe (13,119 km²) from the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia. These regions presently remain uninhabited after the Purgation State instituted a forcible depopulation of these border territories to make room for the installation of military bases in these areas, with all residents being transferred to the remainder of the Purgation State's controlled territory. The legal question of whether the Purgation State holds valid territorial title to these border regions by virtue of 'historical rights' is a disputed issue on which the international community holds largely neutral or divergent views. Thus, in total, the Purgation State exerts control over a territorial landmass of 992,747 km² (some recognised and some unrecognised) and a total population of 2.38 billion persons.

As displayed in the above map, Purgatio is bordered to the south by the Animirian Federation (formerly the Animirian Empire) (in red) and to the east by the People's Democratic Republic of Stulitia (formerly the Kingdom of Stulitia) (in yellow). The Animirian capital city is New Hanseatian and the Stulitian capital city is Glavanská. The Purgation State currently occupies three border regions (all in orange) constituting 'disputed territory' between her and her neighbours. The two 'border regions' on the Purgation-Animirian border are Lilian-en-Alagnon (on the left) and Charenne-du-Sud (on the right). The one 'border region' on the Purgation-Stulitian border is the Meurthe area.

The Purgation State's continental heartland consists of seven Districts (or Les Sept Cantons), each ruled by a provincial Director-General (or Directeur-Général), which are as follows:

1. The District of Montfauçon, with the provincial capital city and former national capital city of Ravaliér (shaded in fuchsia pink);
2. The District of Montoire, with the provincial capital city of Provence (shaded in hot pink), which borders Animiria;
3. The District of Le Tellier, with the provincial capital city of Pétrus (shaded in moss green), which borders Stulitia;
4. The District of Burgundy, with the provincial capital city and present national capital city of Auxiliora (shaded in ocean blue), which borders Cholmondeley and Esterházy;
5. The District of Amboise, with the provincial capital city of Poisson (shaded in violet purple), which borders Lascelles and Arenberg;
6. The District of Lusignan, with the provincial capital city of La Roche (shaded in indigo), which borders Boisschot and Koháry; and finally,
7. The District of Villehardouin, with the provincial capital city of Limogens (shaded in neon green), which borders Boisschot and Stratford.

Since the First and Second Cleansing Wars, the Purgation State has invaded and controlled seven Occupied Territories (or Les Sept Zones de Contrôle), each ruled by a Governor (or Un Chef de la Zone), which are each shaded in brown and are as follows (from left to right in a clockwise direction):

1. The Occupied Territory of Esterházy (formerly the Kingdom of Esterházy);
2. The Occupied Territory of Cholmondeley (formerly the Cholmondeley Commonwealth);
3. The Occupied Territory of Stratford (formerly the Republic of Stratford);
4. The Occupied Territory of Boisschot (formerly the Constitutional Kingdom of Boisschot);
5. The Occupied Territory of Koháry (formerly the Koháry Federation);
6. The Occupied Territory of Lascelles (formerly the People's Republic of Lascelles and the Principality of Lascelles before that); and finally,
7. The Occupied Territory of Arenberg (formerly the Free Republic of Arenberg and the Grand Duchy of Arenberg before that).

Lastly, the coastline of the Purgation State's continental landmass touches the Straits of Moñico to the north and the Sea of Vasconia to the west. Within the Purgation State's territorial waters in the Straits of Moñico lie twelve islands which together form the twelve Overseas Territories of the Purgation State, which are each shaded in dark green and are as follows (from left to right):

1. Île-de-Marras;
2. Île de la Souzaine;
3. Île Mousiques;
4. Île du Seinnaise;
5. Île Belle-Élysiane;
6. Île Fontainesque;
7. Île Saint-Portennaise;
8. Île Saint-Yveslain;
9. Île-de-Bloisine;
10. Île-de-Ghismoine;
11. Château d'Arlagne; and,
12. Île-des-Damnés.

by **Purgatio** » Thu Aug 31, 2023 7:23 pm

Genetic Classifications in Purgation Society

Within the Purgation State, with a socio-cultural regime dominated by the eugenical, biologically-deterministic, and genetically-discriminatory ideals of the Mandatum Est belief system, there are four (or arguably only three) racial-genetic classifications which persons may belong to. They are the following, in order of social prestige and privilege - first, Les Enfants du Ciel; second, the Génétiquement Mélangé (disputed category); third, the Génétiquement Sain; and fourth and last of all, the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel. Membership within each racial-genetic class is entirely a product of one's birth and solely determined by one's innate genetic constitution, amounting to a socially immobile caste system. Within the cultural worldview of PNL Purgatio, these genetic castes have replaced the traditional conception of 'race' (i.e., subdivisions within the human species based on distinct, inheritable, and transmissible physical and social differences shared amongst members of a discrete subdivision), and each racial-genetic caste is often conceived of within the Mandatum Est framework as a separate biological 'sub-species' of the human species, having evolved distinctive genetic characteristics and tendencies through the effects of natural selection, genetic drift, and intra-species competition. While most human societies understand the sociological notion of 'race' to refer to ancestrally differentiated population groups distinguished by geographical descent and origin (viz., White European, Black African, East Asian, etc.), within Purgation society the dominant conception of 'race' is one's genetic-biological caste, which are also conceived of as distinct ancestrally differentiated population groups, but which evolved within a wider geographical population group as opposed to being distinguished by perceived continental origin.

This is not to say, however, that racism as traditionally understood in a non-Purgation context or culture has been vanquished or extinguished altogether. Prejudiced views against various non-White Purgation racial or ethnic minorities do still exist; however, they are interwoven into the new social understanding of 'race' based on these four (or three) putatively genetic-biological castes as outlined above. As will be explored below, there remains a strong correlation between the concept of 'race' as traditionally understood (referring to geographical or continental clines) and the Purgation understanding of 'race' in its relatively modern racial-genetic caste system (conceived of as separate 'sub-species' of the human race within a given population group, defined by 'genetic clusters' or genetically differentiated populations based on purported variations of genetic loci and allelic frequency). Consequently, certain racial and/or ethnic groups (as traditionally understood in a non-Purgation cultural context) may be over-represented or under-represented in various of the abovementioned genetic-biological castes, in large part due to the socio-cultural connection and association between the stereotypes ascribed to a particular racial or ethnic community and the 'desirable' or 'undesirable' traits and characteristics which supposedly define the distinct genetic-biological constitutions of the four 'racial' castes (in the new Purgation sense of the word). These cultural associations and connections will be explored in greater detail as each caste is discussed.

Accordingly, the socio-legal definition of each of the four (or three) castes, as well as their general social characteristics and avowed genetic-biological traits, are each considered in turn, below.

by **Purgatio** » Sat Sep 02, 2023 8:29 pm

Les Enfants du Ciel (637 households only) (<0.0001% of all Purgation households)

The highest caste of this racial-genetic hierarchy is known as Les Enfants du Ciel (sometimes referred to as just Du Ciel for short), literally meaning 'The Children of Heaven'. The main determinant of whether one is a member of this social caste is whether one's household or family is listed within the elite PIGC Registry for its in-vitro fertilisation and artificial genetic engineering conception programme of the same name, which is not open to all Purgations but requires the approval of the PIGC to be eligible for such artificial conception and genetic editing of one's foetus. At the time of the program's inception in 2009, only 587 families were approved and entered into the official PIGC Registry. Since then, that Registry has grown to only 637 households, with 51 families having successfully entered into this elite caste in the intervening years and with just one household having been famously struck-off the register in that time (viz., the De La Pierre family). The Les Enfants du Ciel caste is by far the smallest of the four racial-genetic classes, with its 637 households making up fewer than 0.0001% of all households in the Purgation State. The criteria for the PIGC to enter a household into the PIGC's Les Enfants du Ciel Registry is the 'genetic quality' of a family's 'bloodline and lineage'. The PIGC has a list of so-called 'desirable traits' which it utilises to appraise and evaluate the quality of an applicant household's ancestry - intelligence; creativity; hard work; diligence and conscientiousness; civic-mindedness and community contributions; social and economic productivity; law-abiding and socially co-operative tendencies; health and longevity; impulse-control and capacity for self-restraint; physical and mental resilience; these are traits which, collectively, are regarded as the 'socially desirable' inverse of the 'undesirable traits' of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel.

In reality, given the inherent subjectivity of the assessed criteria, the real determining factor for the success of a family's entry into the PIGC Registry is simply the overall prestige of one's family and ancestry. In other words, if the applicant household and their forebears hold honourable and prestigious high-ranking social positions held in high esteem and regard within the 'high culture' elite social milieu of the Purgation State, including and especially positions of great power and influence, such as the upper ranks of the old ennobled Purgation aristocracy, or high-ranking positions of prestige and influence within politics, governance, law, media, academia, artistic and cultural institutions, scientific and research development, business and commerce, and so on, then there is a good chance of that household being entered into the PIGC Registry for its Les Enfants du Ciel programme.

The primary legal benefit of a child being entered into the PIGC Registry is that the two would-be parents, both of whom hail from households in the registry (known colloquially or informally as une maison du ciel or les maisons du ciel), are eligible to have their child be conceived through in-vitro fertilisation followed by genetic selection and the selective editing of the zygote's genome, purportedly with the intention of favouring 'desirable' characteristics such as intelligence, impulse-control, law-abiding tendencies, civic-mindedness, community spirit, physical and mental health, lifespan longevity, and social and economic productivity (as allegedly determined by a process of forensic epidemiology, comparing the alleles and gene sequences said to be statistically more or less likely to appear within the genome of a so-called 'prestigious' progenitor or forebear of une maison du ciel as compared to the genomes of the rest of the merely 'ordinary' Purgation populace as a whole, similar to the metadata analytical methodology of the Auspex Operandi algorithm's segregation of, and distinction between, the Génétiquement Sain and Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel). If either the would-be mother or would-be father hails from a family which is not entered into the PIGC Registry, then the applicant parents would not be eligible to have their child conceived under the auspices of the PIGC's Les Enfants du Ciel programme.

Irrespective of the scientific veracity or accuracy of the PIGC's claims as to its ability to identify alleles and gene sequences associated with so-called 'socially desirable' traits and characteristics, there is immense socio-cultural prestige attached to being conceived under Les Enfants du Ciel, as it is purportedly culturally associated with one being a more socially contributive and unusually productive member of the Purgation national people's community. Even if one is not conceived under the auspices of Les Enfants du Ciel, however, simply being a member of a family registered into the PIGC Registry carries immense social and cultural capital in itself, as it supposedly constitutes clear and compelling evidence of the recognised quality and superiority of one's bloodline and lineage and the State-legitimised acknowledgement of the prestigious and honourable lives lived by one's parents, ancestors, and their progenitors and forebears before them. Consequently, all of the current 637 Les Maisons du Ciel listed on the PIGC Registry are 'old money' families which have held onto huge multi-generational fortunes for at least three generations or (often) more, and all can trace their ancestry (at least in part) from old Purgation aristocratic families which were gifted seigneurial titles and feudal rights, incidents, and holdings owing to their military and administrative contributions to the preservation of the power of the then-reigning Valois dynasty, all the way back in the 1200s to the 1700s. In fact, many historians have observed that many of the Les Enfants du Ciel households of today can trace their ancestry to the aristocratic associés within the infamous colonial Royal Trading Company of Valois (RTCV) of 1609-1798, which looted and plundered numerous colonial dominions and enslaved millions across the Villalmeyda continent into indentured servitude for the benefit of its tiny elite milieu of well-connected noble families who had the financial capital to invest in the RTCV through strategic inter-marriages with the country's burgeoning haute bourgeoisie whilst having the right courtly connections to the Valois monarchy to have the opportunity to purchase interests in the closely-held and privately-held RTCV from the Valois crown, a clear example of Purgatio's historical inequalities persisting to the present day and being reinforced and further entrenched through the eugenic and genetically-discriminatory policies of the PNL Purgation State.

Whilst the PIGC Les Enfants du Ciel only formally began on 10 November 2009, the honour, esteem, and prestige accorded to this cultural ruling elite class of Purgatio arguably predates the founding of that genetic engineering programme. The presence of a PIGC Registry merely formalised and bureaucratised the process of entry into, and the according of social recognition for a household's membership in, that elite class. However, for many centuries beginning in the late 1500s and early 1600s onwards, the elite strata of the Purgation peerage and landed gentry have always attempted to resist the slow demise of their class and the loss of power and privilege in an increasingly centralised, modernised, and industrialised Purgation society by leveraging the residual cultural prestige associated with aristocratic lineages and feudal titles and holdings to orchestrate arranged (or sometimes even forced) marriages between themselves and other non-aristocratic powerful and influential families in Purgatio, creating a network of incestuous and marital connections between the old aristocratic elite of Purgatio and the non-titled political, economic, and cultural elite of Purgation 'high society'. The criteria for PIGC registration of one's household into the Les Enfants du Ciel Registry - namely, that of a 'prestigious' lineage of 'honourable' and 'respectable' ancestors - is arguably a mere codification and reflection of this pre-existing practice of aristocratic strategic inter-marriages to retain the continued social relevance of that class in contemporary Purgation life, even as the remaining bulk of the Purgation feudal aristocracy (which once constituted 2-3% of the entire Purgation population) that had not undertaken this process of arranged (or forced) strategic inter-marriages had already begun to see their power wane and their influence in Purgation economic and socio-cultural life subside from the early 1600s onwards. Hence, all Les Maisons du Ciel families to date are descended from a mixture or combination of old Purgation feudal aristocratic families, 'old money' wealthy business and commercial families, and families with members who dominate the elite strata of the leaderships of various important sectors of Purgation society, including law, business, commerce, politics, civil service, military, governance, media, academia, arts and 'high culture', the social, charities, and philanthropic sectors, amongst others, creating an incestuous inter-connected network of planned alliances between various powerful actors and institutions within the Purgation State, conjoined through bonds of matrimony and intra-marital procreation. An example of such strategic arranged inter-marriages may be seen in the case of La Maison de Lussan or the De Lussan family. That household is descended from the prestigious Duke of Savoy-Ducasse, with the 17^th Duke of Savoy-Ducasse, Nazaire de Lussan, marrying an heiress to the Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon (CCM) banking fortune, Julie Noiret, joining the aristocratic family's cultural capital with the vast financial capital of the Noiret family as invested in its 21.6% plurality shareholding in the CCM financial institution, after the company went public. Subsequently, the 18^th Duke of Savoy-Ducasse, Jean-Louis de Lussan, married Joslyn Lacôte, a high-ranking Chief Federal Prosecutor in the Federal Prosecution Service (FPS) and future Home Secretary of PNL Purgatio, descended from a Cabinet Secretary of the Home Office and many other senior and very well-respected civil servants within the professional Home Civil Service. Consequently, when they and their sons (Ansel and Célestin de Lussan) were entered into the PIGC Registry in December of 2009, it was on account of the 'prestige', 'honour', and 'esteem' which the PIGC accorded to all of the ancestors of Ansel and Célestin de Lussan, both the aristocratic and non-aristocratic alike, making for what the PIGC regarded as a 'high-quality' and 'superior' bloodline, breeding, and lineage altogether.

Each household or maison listed in the PIGC Registry consists of a 'family register', with a list of members formally inscribed within that 'family register'. Hence, not all household members merely related by blood to a member of a Les Enfants du Ciel family is automatically considered a member of this social caste. Rather, it is not enough for one's family to be listed in the PIGC Registry, one's name needs to also be individually inscribed into that household's assigned 'family register' in the PIGC's records. The reason for this is obvious - different branches of a larger extended household will not have the same lineage and ancestry, first cousins and second cousins and so on will have different forebears and ancestors, with varying degrees of prestige and honour assigned to those respective bloodlines. Consequently, it is not unusual for some members of an extended household to be deemed to have a sufficiently 'prestigious' bloodline to warrant entry into the PIGC Registry for its Les Enfants du Ciel programme and for other members of that same extended household to be excluded from that 'family register'. The most prominent example of this is the De La Pierre family, which suffered a serious fall from social grace from 2018-2020. When La Maison de la Pierre was removed from the PIGC Registry for Les Enfants du Ciel on 15 July 2020, following the re-classification of two members of that family (Marc-Henri and Louis de la Pierre) from Sain to Dysfonctionnel, the entire De La Pierre 'family register' was de-registered from the PIGC Registry. However, not all members of that 'family register' lost their registered status as Les Enfants du Ciel, because they were shifted to other 'family registers' in the PIGC Registry. The most famous example of that is Jacques-Laurent du Raj de la Pierre, A.C., a second cousin of Marc-Henri de la Pierre, A.C., descended from a distaff branch of the family to form the Du Raj de la Pierre branch of that household. When the other elite Purgation families who dominated and oligopolised the Purgation legal industry banded together to tear down the De La Pierre family and bring the members of their main branch to social and reputational ruination and annihilation, Jacques-Laurent du Raj de la Pierre, A.C., was spared from that terrible fate due to his consanguine distance from the De La Pierre main branch, which had been disgraced by the actions of Marc-Henri and Louis de la Pierre, and more importantly, his marriage into one of the elite Purgation families who had participated in the destruction of the De La Pierre main branch, by virtue of his marriage to the Lady President of the Supreme Court, Clothilde d'Hénin-Liétard d'Alsace. Consequently, he and his daughters (Diane and Élisabeth du Raj de la Pierre) were moved from the De La Pierre 'family register' into the 'family register' of La Maison d'Alsace instead, retaining their social status as Les Enfants du Ciel. Likewise, the three minor children of Louis de la Pierre (Maxence, Lucie-Coutain, and Renaud de la Pierre) were similarly moved from the stricken-off ‘family register’ of La Maison de la Pierre to the ‘family register’ of their mother, La Maison d’Amboise of Juliette-Élise d’Amboise, in no small part due to her last-minute volte-face and the strategic betrayal of her husband and his family in order to salvage her and her children’s social standing within the Purgation haut monde and le bon-ton.

It is not possible for an individual person to enter the Les Enfants du Ciel caste merely on account of one's own individual achievements, accomplishments, or personally acquired wealth and honours. The caste is intended as a measure of familial prestige, of the 'genetic quality' of one's lineage, bloodline, and ancestry. No matter how rich or wealthy a person becomes in their business ventures, or how successful and highly-ranked they become as they soar upwards through the prestigious ranks of their chosen career or calling, that alone will not qualify them as a Les Enfants du Ciel denizen, nor would it render them eligible to have their family entered into a 'family register' of the PIGC Registry of Les Enfants du Ciel. That being said, while it is not possible for an individual to enter this caste, it is possible for future descendants of a family to eventually rise into this caste after several generations have passed. This is because, rather than adopting a strict 'one drop rule' approach to its assessment, the PIGC adopts a 'three generation rule' in assessing the relative prestige of a person's bloodline. In other words, the PIGC will 'forgive' or 'overlook' a merely ordinary great-grandparent or earlier, but will consider the presence of a merely ordinary parent or grandparent to be completely disqualifying for a person's application to be considered Les Enfants du Ciel, on the basis of what it considers 'an overly proximate genetic mediocrity'. The reason for the seemingly arbitrary 'three generation rule' appears to be largely socio-cultural, as the Les Enfants du Ciel Registry functions as a de facto social registry of 'high society' families in Purgatio, analogous to the Social Register in the United States, Debrett's in the United Kingdom, Carnet Mondain in Belgium, or Libro d'Oro in Italy. The 'three generation rule' therefore functions as effective gatekeeping into Purgation 'high society' luncheons, dinners, country clubs, polo and regatta competitions, museum gallery viewings, masquerade balls, elite private schools and universities, and other prestigious social events in which elite families within Purgatio may be expected to rub shoulders and congregate. The 'three generation rule' serves as comfort to the Purgation cultural elite by ensuring that no person with a living ancestor of socio-cultural disrepute or carrying the stigmatising stain of the ignonimity of mere social mediocrity will be 'smuggled' through the gilded gates of an exclusive 'high society' event through a bureaucratic backdoor by virtue of a recent nouveau riche, arriviste, social climbing child or grand-child, because by the time a person is old enough to have proven their individual prestige and to apply to be registered in the PIGC Registry by virtue of the 'three generation rule', said applicant's merely ordinary, mediocre, or low-born forebears will presumably be either dead or near-death by that point anyways. Consequently, many upper-class Sain families who attend 'high society' events and rub shoulders with other elite Purgation families, but who are not themselves eligible to become Les Enfants du Ciel due to an insufficiently 'prestigious' family lineage and ancestry, nevertheless aspire to have their grand-children or great-grandchildren eventually break into this prestigious stratospheric social caste, and will network furiously at 'high society' events and properly curate their own social calendars and the social circles and associations of their children and grand-children with an eye towards paving the way for future generations of their family to eventually attain successful registration onto the PIGC Registry.

This is not to say, however, that by virtue of the 'three generation rule', the PIGC never considers the lifetime outcomes and achievements of an applicant's great-grandparent or other forebears. The 'three generation rule', which is itself a colloquial turn of phrase anyway and which should not be construed as a strict literal legal rule, means simply that a mediocre and ordinary parent or grand-parent is automatically disqualifying for any applicant's desired entry into the PIGC Les Enfants du Ciel Registry, and that a merely mediocre and ordinary great-grandparent is not automatically disqualifying therefor. However, the PIGC will still consider the relative prestige (or lack thereof) of said mediocre great-grandparent (or above) and assess their lifetime outcomes and achievements against gradations of comparative dishonour and disrepute. An applicant with parents and grandparents who all meet the PIGC threshold of so-called 'sufficient prestige', based either on their personal accomplishments or their outstanding lineages, and whose great-grandparents lived merely ordinary lives which were neither hugely prestigious nor immensely disreputable, such as being an ordinary lawyer, doctor, banker, or accountant, would likely have their application accepted by virtue of the 'three generation rule', provided all of their parents and grandparents satisfy the PIGC's assessed criteria of having 'sufficient prestige' in their personal achievements and/or that of the lineage or bloodline they were descended from. In contrast, if that same applicant had a great-grandparent or great-great-grandparent whose life was not just merely mediocre, but disreputable and 'disordered' in the PIGC's assessment, such as being a convicted (or even reputed) serial criminal, or having multiple children out-of-wedlock from different absentee fathers, or living in severe poverty with bouts of long-term unemployment or welfare dependency, or being a high school dropout or having flunked or failed out of ordinary education, then it is very likely that that application will be refused by the PIGC on account of the 'poor genetic quality' of the applicant's lineage and bloodline.

In other words, the 'three generation rule' is best understood as a rule of exclusion rather than a rule of inclusion. The rule's underlying intent is to make certain that a person with even one parent or grandparent of 'insufficient prestige and honour' (howsoever the PIGC assesses and defines that criterion) will be automatically ineligible to be classified as Les Enfants du Ciel and enter the PIGC Registry. However, a person whose parents and grandparents all meet the threshold of 'sufficient prestige and honour' may still be ineligible if their earlier forebears and progenitors lived sufficiently dishonourable or disreputable lives. The 'three generation rule' provides assurance to the 'old money' Purgation families that dominate Purgation 'high society' and the wider haut monde or le bon-ton that a vulgar 'new money' nouveau riche or self-made arriviste billionaire and their children will be automatically disqualified from entry into this highly prestigious and exclusive social caste. It does not, however, guarantee entry to anyone whose parents and grandparents all supposedly 'make the cut', so to speak.

The 'three generation rule' is also best understood as an evidential burden. The PIGC's approach to Les Enfants du Ciel applications is to presume that a person is 'genotypically ordinary' unless proven otherwise. The burden is on the applicant to displace the presumption of 'genetic mediocrity'. This presumption can be displaced in one of two ways. Either the applicant shows that a person is 'phenotypically extraordinary' (i.e., that through their lifetime achievements, their lifetime outcomes and accomplishments meet the PIGC's definition of so-called 'sufficient prestige') or 'genotypically extraordinary' (i.e., that their descent and lineage proves that they have a bloodline descent of extraordinary forebears). When it comes to proving a person is 'genotypically extraordinary', the 'three generation rule' becomes critical. In order to prove a person is 'genotypically extraordinary', one would need to prove that all of their parents and grandparents meet the criteria of being either 'phenotypically extraordinary' or 'genotypically extraordinary'. For a person's application to the PIGC to be successful (either their application to become the founder of a new Les Enfants du Ciel family or their application to be entered into the 'family register' of an existing La Maison du Ciel), they must prove that they themselves are 'genotypically extraordinary' (not 'phenotypically extraordinary' as an applicant cannot succeed in their application by pointing to individual prestige or personal accomplishments, only by way of proving the prestige of one's lineage), by satisfying the PIGC that, at the bare minimum, all of their parents and grandparents satisfy the criteria of being either 'phenotypically extraordinary' or 'genotypically extraordinary'. The PIGC will presume that all persons are 'phenotypically and genotypically ordinary' unless otherwise proven by the applicant, with sufficient ancestral and genealogical records. However, it will not presume that any earlier forebears, such as great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents, were significantly disreputable or dishonourable to warrant an applicant's exclusion from the PIGC Registry, unless an objecting family furnishes evidence to the contrary. In other words, above the three generations, the PIGC is prepared to give an applicant the benefit of the doubt, but within the three generations, it is not.

What this means, in practice, is that if an applicant can prove that all of their parents and grandparents are 'phenotypically extraordinary' based on their individual lifetime accomplishments (which is extremely rare and has not been successfully shown to date), their PIGC application is likely to be successful. If an applicant can only prove that both parents and three grandparents are 'phenotypically extraordinary', but not for one of their grandparents (say, hypothetically, their maternal grandmother, who was just a homemaker), then in order for their application to succeed, they would need to show that that grandparent was 'genotypically extraordinary' instead, meaning that they must now furnish additional evidence to show that that grandparent's parents and grandparents were all either 'phenotypically extraordinary' or 'genotypically extraordinary'. If two grandparents cannot be shown to be 'phenotypically extraordinary', then the applicant now bears the burden of proving that all of the parents and grandparents of those two grandparents were either 'phenotypically extraordinary' or 'genotypically extraordinary' in order to prove that those two grandparents are 'genotypically extraordinary'. This is also why it is not a coincidence that every household and family in the Les Enfants du Ciel Registry is descended, at least in part, from an old Purgation aristocratic household. Since it is rare, if not outright impossible, for a person to have six grandparents and parents who lived stellar and extraordinary lives and racked up numerous honourable awards and accomplishments, invariably, successful applicants will usually need sufficient evidence of the prestigious lineages of at least some of their parents or grandparents, which is generally much easier for a Purgation family to satisfactorily show if their ancestors consist of a mixture of powerful and influential non-aristocratic forebears (who meet the criteria of being 'phenotypically extraordinary') who inter-married with their aristocratic forebears (who meet the criteria of being 'genotypically extraordinary', being able to trace their descent from a powerful and prestigious family during Purgatio's feudal monarchical era). It should be noted, however, that merely being descended from a feudal aristocratic bloodline or lineage is not enough, ipso facto, to claim the privileged and prestigious social status of a Les Enfants du Ciel family. There are over 900,000 families in the Purgation State which claim to be able to trace their descent from an old pre-revolutionary Purgation aristocratic family (approximately 0.1% of all Purgation households), yet only a tiny fraction of those families (637 to date, just 0.07% of all households within that class) have successfully attained that status. Hence, the mere possession of a noble title is not enough by itself, a family must be able to point to other sources of prestige, success, honour, and renown within Purgation 'high society', and invariably, this will often be easier to demonstrate for a Purgation aristocratic family which has also inter-married with certain other powerful and influential non-aristocratic families, forming marital and consanguine alliances with the modern haute bourgeoisie class, and thereby bringing in contemporary economic, media, and political capital into an elite, high-born family descended from a feudal peerage and landed gentry class that had arguably become obsolete and socially redundant in a modernised, industrialised society.

The Les Enfants du Ciel caste operates as a self-regulated cartel, with entry into, and exit from, this elite strata being determined by its current members. All applications to the PIGC to be added to the PIGC Registry must be sponsored by an existing member - the only families which did not have to meet this requirement were the first 587 families whose applications and 'family registers' were registered at the very inception of the programme back in 2009. Once an application is made, each of the Les Enfants du Ciel families are permitted to file Notices of Objection or Notices of No Objection to the application. Objecting families will normally accompany their objections with evidence that the applicant is not 'genotypically extraordinary'. Usually, this takes the form of either allegations of dishonourable and disreputable behaviour engaged in by the applicant's forebears or ancestors, or contesting the biological parentage and/or the legitimacy of the applicant or the applicant's parents and grandparents, which is an extremely common ground for such Notices of Objection being filed. The PIGC will usually have to make a determination as to whether the applicant meets the criteria to either found a new Les Enfants du Ciel family or to be entered into the 'family register' of an existing La Maison du Ciel. In practice, since the PIGC Registry functions as a de facto 'social registry', the views of the other 'high society' families in the Purgation ruling class will be hugely influential and are arguably determinative of the outcome of one's application. The PIGC has not, to date, ever refused a registration that was overwhelmingly supported by the other Purgation elite families, nor has it ever granted a registration that was overwhelmingly opposed and objected to by the same. In the same way as one of Les Maisons du Ciel can sponsor a new application for entry into this caste - the most common reason being a prospective marriage between a member of that caste and a prospective spouse falling outside of the PIGC Registry but hailing from a prestigious and honourable family - one of the families can also file an application for another family to be struck off the PIGC Registry, or for an individual person to be struck off one of the Registry's 'family registers'. This was precisely what happened in 2020 when five elite aristocratic families (La Maison d'Évreux; La Maison de Bauffremont; La Maison d'Alsace; La Maison du Châteauveuf; La Maison de Beaucastel) collaborated and coordinated their efforts to put in separate similar applications for the entire 'family register' of La Maison de la Pierre to be struck off the PIGC Registry for its Les Enfants du Ciel programme, after conspiring to bring that family and its patriarch (Marc-Henri) and scion (Louis) into a very public disgrace and disrepute in the legal profession and within Purgation 'high society' more broadly, which ultimately culminated in the successful striking-off of the De La Pierre 'family register' by the PIGC Director on 15 July 2020.

Although the Purgation racial-genetic caste system has replaced the traditional notion of 'race' as conventionally understood outside of Purgatio as referring to one's geographical or continental origins, there remains a strong correlation and connection between 'race' (as traditionally understood in the non-Purgation sense of continental clines) and the Les Enfants du Ciel racial-genetic caste, which cannot be ignored. White Purgations are overwhelmingly overrepresented in the Les Enfants du Ciel caste, making up around 90-92% of all members of this racial-genetic caste whilst making up only 83.6% of the general Purgation population. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that every member of the Les Enfants du Ciel can trace their descent, at least in part, to an old feudal aristocratic family in Purgation history, which would invariably consist of White Purgation forebears and progenitors. Nevertheless, because the Les Enfants du Ciel caste consists of families whose aristocratic forebears strategically inter-married with non-aristocratic households holding prestigious, esteemed, or honourable positions of power and influence in modern Purgation society, there remains a substantial minority of Les Enfants du Ciel individuals (i.e., the remaining 8-10%) who identify as 'Mixed' or 'Mixed-Race', being partially White Purgation (from their Purgation aristocratic progenitors) and non-White Purgation (from their non-Purgation aristocratic forebears). It is important to note, however, that slightly over half of the so-called 'Mixed' segment of the Les Enfants du Ciel aristocracy are actually still fully White, often involving strategic inter-marriages between the Purgation aristocracy and the ruling elites of the seven Purgation Occupied Territories (be it aristocratic or non-aristocratic governing elites), a particularly prominent example being La Maison de la Fayette (the family of the current Magnificus Dominus and Le Grand Roi de la Purgatio, Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette) which saw an inter-marriage between a Purgation royal princess (Inès de Lancaster-Valois) and a Cholmondeley aristocrat (Walter Lancaster), the former of whom would be considered ethnically White Purgation whilst the latter would be considered ethnically White Other instead.

However, there remains a not insubstantial minority (~3-4%) of 'Mixed' and non-White members of the Les Enfants du Ciel caste, but these generally do not involve inter-racial inter-marriages with existing domestic ethnic minorities within the Purgation populace (e.g., Black Purgations; Arab Purgations; certain South Asian Purgations (such as Pakistani or Bangladeshi groups), certain White Other groups (such as various Mediterranean or Eastern European sub-groups), etc.), communities which are disproportionately under-represented in the Purgation State's historical governing elites and ruling classes, and thus are also statistically less likely to have been amongst the non-aristocratic ruling elites which the Purgation aristocracy brokered any strategic inter-marriages with. Instead, the more common arrangement is for a Purgation aristocratic family to inter-marry with a prominent, high-profile, well-connected foreign household from a far-away, far-flung civilisation considered historically 'glorious', 'renowned', or 'distinguished' in some way, the most common sources being the wealthy and prestigious 'old money' scholar-gentry shenshi and wenban landed aristocratic families and well-connected imperial courtiers and influential titled warlords from the distant Ruanyang Imperial Paramountcy, the elite oligarchical well-connected network of princely rajas or thakurs, regional satraps, and colonial viceroys from the far-flung Vasumitran Maharajahnate, and the small circle of distantly related cadet branch royals and princes, titled descendants of royal mistresses and concubines, and a small network of elite aristocratic generals, sardars, nawabs, chieftains, viziers, and governors from the far-away Grand Shahdom of Izmiria. Two prominent examples of present-day members of the Les Enfants du Ciel caste who resulted from such inter-racial, inter-aristocratic marriages are Diane du Raj de la Pierre (descended on her father's side from a wealthy family of princely rajas who inter-married with the distaff branch of the De La Pierre family and adopted the Francised surname of Du Raj to better assimilate into Purgation culture) and Jaufré de Sablé (descended on his mother's side from a wealthy scholar-gentry landowning aristocratic family consisting of a long line of imperial court officials and high-ranking scholar-officials in the imperial bureaucracy). Such inter-racial inter-marriages are often brokered for either pragmatic economic reasons (to bring in new foreign capital into an elite Purgation family by marrying overseas elite families with wealthy business interests to access evermore economic capital to better compete with and one-up other Purgation aristocratic families) or the sheer cultural fetishism of being able to 'acquire' a novel and exotically 'Orientalised' (yet still prestigiously high-born) branch of one's family to show off at galas, dinners, and soirées (i.e., just as an aristocratic dilettante or wealthy socialite may show off or brag about a new precious jewel, treasured artefact, sculpted pottery, fine china, or other 'exotic' antiquity they recently managed to acquire from Ruanyang, Vasumitra, or Izmiria, the same can also be done with a brand-new inter-bred grand-child, grand-niece, grand-nephew, or various cousins twice removed, with a nonetheless prestigiously aristocratic yet 'exotically' foreign lineage that one's family has successfully 'acquired' as well), or more often for both.

Thus, the racial breakdown of the Les Enfants du Ciel caste consists of an overwhelming majority of White Purgations (~90-92%) far greater than the relative proportion thereof within the broader Purgation population as a whole, with a small number of 'Mixed' White Purgations and White Non-Purgations (~5-6%) largely involving inter-marriages with the ruling aristocracies or the non-aristocratic governing elites of the seven Purgation Occupied Territories, and an even smaller number of 'Mixed' White and Non-White individuals (~3-4%) overwhelmingly composed of inter-marriages between the Purgation aristocracy and the overseas aristocratic ruling classes of other foreign, far-flung, far-off, and distant absolutist or autocratic monarchies, like the Ruanyang Imperial Paramountcy, Vasumitran Maharajahnate, or Grand Shahdom of Izmiria, resulting in small handfuls of part-Chinese, part-Indian, and part-Persian members of an overwhelmingly White Purgation Les Enfants du Ciel aristocratic caste.

by **Purgatio** » Sun Sep 03, 2023 12:56 am

Génétiquement Mélangé (2,500-4,000 households) (<0.0005% of all Purgation households)

The next highest racial-genetic caste in the Purgation social hierarchy, and the second-smallest of the four castes, is the Génétiquement Mélangé caste (sometimes referred to as just Mélangé for short). The existence of this caste is a matter of dispute amongst sociologists and academics, for the simple reason that, of the four castes, the Génétiquement Mélangé caste is the only caste that is not officially or legally defined in any PIGC administrative policy or framework, and there is no centralised, officious, or bureaucratic process for the exact determination of which persons are or are not members of this purported caste. Nevertheless, it is often argued by foreign sociologists and commentators that while the Mélangé caste does not exist as a defined legal category, it certainly exists as a matter of socio-cultural perception, with its estimated 2,500-4,000 households - amounting to less than 0.0005% of all households in the Purgation State - occupying an interstitial or socially liminal space between the elite prestigious Les Enfants du Ciel and the merely ordinary or typical Génétiquement Sain.

As the name suggests, the Mélangé refers to persons who are considered a 'blend' or 'mixture' of the so-called 'superior' blood of the Les Enfants du Ciel and the so-called 'ordinary' blood of the merely average Sain. There are two distinct ways in which an individual may be regarded as Mélangé, roughly half of this caste falls into a category colloquially referred to as Mélangé ex ante, and with the other half being casually termed as Mélangé ex post.

A person is regarded as being of the Mélangé ex ante variety if the relevant 'mixture' occurred before a high-placed Purgation family attained its legal status as a prestigious La Maison du Ciel registered on the official PIGC Les Enfants du Ciel Registry. This is extremely common with the cadet or distaff branches of a family which manages to successfully obtain the prestigious status of Les Enfants du Ciel, based upon the 'prestigious' bloodlines of the particular family members successfully entered into the PIGC 'family register' of that household. Invariably, there will be siblings or cousins who have married different spouses or were descended and conceived from different marital unions, and some of those bloodlines or lineages may not be regarded as equally and sufficiently 'prestigious' and 'superior' as that of the specific branch of that household which had successfully obtained its registration on the PIGC Les Enfants du Ciel Registry. In such a case, the unregistered relatives of that family may be regarded as Mélangé, being a genetic 'mixture' of the superior bloodline of the La Maison du Ciel family they are partially related to alongside the ordinary bloodline of a regular Sain family they are also descended from. That family will often enjoy and experience the reflected glory and prestige of the La Maison du Ciel family they possess a partial consanguine relation to, but often without the full extent of the prestige and honour accorded to the actual La Maison du Ciel family members whose names are inscribed in the PIGC's 'family register'.

Prominent examples of Mélangé ex ante persons include the household familial branch of Nicolas Charlet (alongside his children, his siblings, his cousins, and all their descendants), the paternal uncle of the Commandant en Chef of the Purification Order, Delrico Charlet. Although the Commandant en Chef and his wife, the aristocratic heiress of a major pharmaceutical business empire (Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac), were able to obtain PIGC registration for themselves and their children under the 'family register' of La Maison de Charlet-Vérac at the very inception of the PIGC Les Enfants du Ciel programme in 2009, nevertheless, that same prestigious and highly exclusive classification was not extended to the Commandant en Chef's uncles, aunts, and various cousins and their respective progenies, who had not distinguished themselves so unusually in the powerful Purification Order, and did not manage to attain such a prestigious and high-placed marital union to an aristocratic heiress. As such, while such individuals like Nicolas Charlet might share some consanguine relation to an existing Les Enfants du Ciel family (namely, the registered La Maison de Charlet-Vérac), their descent or bloodline is not deemed to be as 'superior' or 'prestigious' as that of the Commandant en Chef and his children and descendants. Consequently, persons like Nicolas Charlet might be regarded in polite or 'high society' as a Mélangé or 'mixed' individual, thereby enjoying a reflected glory attained through the possession of a prestigious association or proximity to one of the few 'elite families' in the Purgation State and Purgation 'high society', and thus regarded as superior to a genotypically ordinary Génétiquement Sain household, but only to that extent alone.

Likewise, another prominent example that may be cited by way of illustration are the various relatives of the Attorney-General, Lucien Vannier, who married into a wealthy aristocratic family that was very well-connected within the highest Purgation social, charitable, and philanthropic circles and frequently and comfortably traversed the top elite circles of the nation's educational trusts, scholarship boards, university boards of regents and governors, and various educational charities and organisations, by marrying Delphine d'Amboise of La Maison d'Amboise. Consequently, due in no small part to the unusual contributions and great political influence wielded by the Attorney-General, he was also able to obtain a successful registration of himself, his wife, and his children onto the PIGC Les Enfants du Ciel Registry with the 'family register' of La Maison de Vannier-Amboise. However, Lucien Vannier's various uncles, aunts, and cousins have likewise largely gone on to become rather ordinary lawyers who have been quite successful in that chosen field (with many even becoming senior partners of prominent law firms within the Purgation legal industry, such as the Attorney-General's paternal aunt Marceline Vannier, a famed corporate and transactions solicitor and a named senior partner of one of the country's 'Golden Circle' law firms, De Beaucastel Vannier Mendès Valmore et Associés, S.N.C.), but nevertheless have not attained the unusual and exceptional prestige and extraordinary social influence that is required to break into the elite and highly exclusionary Les Enfants du Ciel social caste. Consequently, these various relatives of the Attorney-General Lucien Vannier would likely be regarded as Mélangé within the elite milieu of the Purgation haut monde or le bon-ton and accorded due respect on account of their consanguine and social proximity to an esteemed Les Enfants du Ciel family that has been gifted a 'family register' in the PIGC's official records (as La Maison de Vannier-Amboise), although they would not be accorded the full unvarnished respect and prestige accorded to the actual officially registered members within the PIGC Registry itself.

In contrast, the Mélangé ex post label is used to casually refer to those Mélangé persons who are 'mixed' by virtue of being the product of procreation and inter-breeding between an existing registered member of the Les Enfants du Ciel racial-genetic caste (registered on the PIGC Registry to that effect) and an ordinary member of the Génétiquement Sain caste who, nonetheless, is not privy to that exclusionary and privileged status in law. This can happen in a whole variety of ways from the planned and respectable to the unplanned and downright scandalous of circumstances. On one end of the spectrum, a Mélange ex post child may be conceived as a result of a planned marital union between a Les Maison du Ciel scion or heiress and a normal Sain child born to an honourable, prestigious, and highly-esteemed or socially-influential upper-class Purgation family, with an eye towards registering the intended spouse as a member of the Les Enfants du Ciel household's official 'family register'. However, when the fiancé(e)'s application to be included in the 'family register' is rejected on account of the 'insufficient prestige' of their bloodline and lineage, the Les Enfants du Ciel family may nevertheless persist in supporting the marital union on account of the economic, political, or social capital wielded by the intended spouse's family, and consequently, any children conceived 'in wedlock' within this marital union would be regarded as Mélangé ex post. On the other end of the spectrum altogether, however, the circumstances of a conception or production of a Mélangé ex post can be much more scandalous and shameful if it is brought about by an unplanned out-of-wedlock conception, such as a secret adulterous affair between a Les Enfants du Ciel person and their merely genetically ordinary Sain paramour or mistress or an accidental teenage impregnation between a reckless or foolhardy Les Enfants du Ciel teenager and their ordinary Sain boyfriend or girlfriend.

Unlike with the ex ante category explored earlier, the respect and prestige accorded to the Mélangé ex post can vary widely from individual-to-individual, in no small part due to the differing and divergent cultural attitudes within the elite Purgation aristocratic caste. At the risk of oversimplification or reductive generalisation, the Les Enfants du Ciel caste is presently beset by two cultural instincts and social impulses which, at least in this particular scenario, pull in opposite directions. There is the 'traditionalist aristocratic' cultural impulse to favour intra-class marital unions and procreation over inter-class unions which, for this aristocratic elite, are often viewed as hypogamous in nature and a form of social dérogeance or a derogation of the noble household's prestige and familial honour, and consequently may be viewed as somewhat degrading to a family that regards itself as a 'pure' aristocratic blue-blooded family with an 'unadulterated' lineage. However, there is also a competing 'eugenical quasi-scientific' social impulse that is more modern in its character, brought on largely by the increasingly close connection between the Purgation aristocratic elite and the PNL Purgation State's reigning fascistic autocratic regime, influenced by the materialistic and social Darwinistic ideals of the Mandatum Est philosophy. This more modern 'eugenical quasi-scientific' impulse would regard such inter-caste out-marriages as good for the Purgation elite, it brings 'fresh blood' into the Purgation aristocracy, prevents incestuous in-breeding that would be the inevitable result of every Les Enfants du Ciel child only marrying other Les Enfants du Ciel children within their elite rarefied milieu of fewer than 650 households, and preserves and improves the 'genetic quality' of the Purgation ruling elite by selecting the 'best of the best' and the crème de la crème amongst the Sain - especially the more talented and accomplished of the upper-classes thereof - for inclusion into this elite and prestigious circle, in a process of social competition over one’s marriageable prospects to pre-select the best spousal candidates in a quasi-‘survival of the fittest’ fashion so prized and praised within the Mandatum Est belief system.

In practice, views amongst the Purgation Les Enfants du Ciel aristocracy span the entire gamut on this issue whilst regressing towards the mean. To put it another way, whilst there is a tiny minority of families and individuals who are wedded steadfastly to the more conservative (if not increasingly culturally archaic and somewhat out-of-touch) 'traditionalistic aristocratic' view outlined above (members of La Maison de Corday, La Maison de Givenchy, La Maison du Jardin-de-Fleurs, La Maison de Créquy, La Maison d'Alsace, La Maison de la Pierre (before their social extinction and brutal destruction), La Maison du Quenoy, La Maison de la Falaise, La Maison de la Garde de Chambonas, La Maison de Sablé, and La Maison de Muset are generally notorious for holding such attitudes), and there is also another tiny minority of families and individuals on the exact other end of the spectrum who, ceteris paribus, will generally perceive very little difference between a Mélangé offspring and one conceived between two Les Enfants du Ciel parents, provided of course that it is planned in advance and within wedlock and the Sain spouse hails from a family of some social prestige and esteem (members of La Maison de la Fayette, La Maison de Laval, La Maison de Charlet-Vérac, La Maison de la Trémouille, La Maison de Lussan, La Maison d'Aubigné, La Maison de Valentinois, La Maison de Taillefer, La Maison de Vannier-Amboise, and La Maison d'Amboise are amongst the more well-known families whose members are more commonly associated with this view), the overwhelming majority of the Les Enfants du Ciel elite (well over 95%, in fact) would fall somewhere in the middle between these two ideological extremes.

What this means, in practice, is that the degree of the prestige, honour, and acceptance accorded to a Mélangé varies widely between individual persons and is often context-specific in nature, being dependent upon a whole myriad of differing factors, including the relative prestige and power of the Les Enfants du Ciel parent, the extent of the social influence wielded by the Sain parent and the family they come from, whether the child was born within wedlock or out-of-wedlock, whether the other surrounding circumstances of the conception were honourable or scandalous, the wealth or expected inheritance of the Sain spouse, whether the Sain spouse's family is 'old money' or 'new money', whether the Sain spouse has shown themselves to be unusually gifted or exceptionally talented in some way, and even factors as vain and superficial as how physically attractive the Sain spouse may be deemed to be. This is better appreciated by way of examples. Perhaps the most prominent examples of Mélangé ex post offspring are the two children of La Princesse de la Couronne Françoise-Valentine de la Fayette and her spouse and Prince-Consort Thierry Gayet (Mélanie and Gabriel de la Fayette), who may not be members of the Les Enfants du Ciel caste stricto sensu, but in practice are generally treated by Les Enfants du Ciel elite aristocrats and regular Sain persons as if they were equally prestigious as - if not more prestigious than - the average denizen of this elite Les Enfants du Ciel racial-genetic caste, in no small part due to the power and prestige of the family those children belong to - namely, La Maison de la Fayette, the household of the present Magnificus Dominus and the High Inquisitor of PICOS. This, coupled with the honourable and esteemed profession of the Sain spouse Thierry Gayet (a high-ranking army doctor and surgeon in the PAF) which commands much respect, and his famed physical attractiveness and studly easy-on-the-eyes appearance, more than 'makes up' for the absence of Les Enfants du Ciel status of the children's father and his nouveau riche social status (being born to a professional celebrity footballer, Michel Gayet, and an heiress to a relatively recent bottled mineral and sparking water fortune, Anne Perrin), in terms of social prestige and respect.

Another such example may be gleaned from the children of Benoît de Charlet-Vérac (Yvette, Michèle, Gérald, and Régine-Perrine de Charlet-Vérac), who is the only son of the Commandant en Chef Delrico Charlet and the aristocratic heiress to the Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac fortune, Sylvie de Vérac. Similar to the children of La Princesse de la Couronne, the children of the President of the Purification Order's Youth League would certainly derive an immense degree of reflected glory and prestige by virtue of their descent from, and close proximity to, such a politically powerful member of the Les Enfants du Ciel caste. It also operates in the children's favour that their mother, Audrey Reverdienne, while neither aristocratic nor Les Enfants du Ciel herself, belongs to the wealthiest family in the Purgation State - the Reverdienne family - which owns a majority shareholding interest in the nation's largest supermarket and retail store chain, Tout le Temps!, and has been estimated by Forbes to have a total familial net worth of over US$680 billion in 2022. This, when combined with their maternal grandmother's aristocratic lineage and her inherited wealth in Les Pharmaceutiques de Vérac (estimated to be worth anywhere between US$150-200 billion), easily makes the three Mélangé De Charlet-Vérac children the richest heirs and heiresses in the entirety of the Purgation State, all of which operates in their favour in terms of garnering prestige and respect. However, their mother's family fortune in Tout le Temps! is relatively 'green' and recent, the family's supermarket chain was opened in 1975 and the business really only boomed in the 1980s onwards, making her parents extremely nouveau riche indeed. Moreover, her job as a firebrand far-right journalist and celebrity news anchor on the right-wing Les Potins du Matin news channel is generally regarded within the elite circles of Purgation 'high society' as neither particularly dishonourable nor unusually prestigious or respectable either. However, the family's extreme level of wealth and particularly potent political connections to a very powerful and fearsome institution in the country (the Purification Order) certainly engenders a high degree of respect, substantially shoring-up the honour and prestige that is accorded to the three Mélangé De Charlet-Vérac children - although, given the general perception of the Reverdienne family as vulgar nouveau riche and arriviste types, there may be some limited sense of genteel superiority within the most snooty and arrogant of the Les Enfants du Ciel aristocratic families, but these sentiments, to the limited extent that they still persist, would most certainly be kept to hushed whispers and confined behind closed doors, if they are even uttered aloud at all.

Finally, another example of the liminal and complicated status of the Mélangé may be seen in the recent joinder and union of the Du Roussillon aristocratic household with the powerful Courvoisier family which owns the largest media empire in the country, owning and controlling the far-right Halcyon News Network (HNN) channel which is the most watched news channel in the country, alongside a slew of right-wing tabloids and other daily newspapers. The Du Roussillon family are a registered Les Enfants du Ciel family; however, they are not unusually prestigious nor exceptionally powerful and influential, at least when compared to other members of that elite caste, being simple multi-millionaire winemakers, vintners, and vineyard owners without the stratospheric wealth or political power of La Maison de la Fayette or La Maison de Charlet-Vérac. In contrast, the Courvoisier family are a household of relatively humble beginnings, with the founder of the family fortune (Reimonde Courvoisier) being a simple company clerk born to a working-class family of longshoremen in Poisson, who went on to build the country's largest and most notorious media empire from the 1950s to the 1970s, with the Courvoisier family controlling an estimated 50-60% of all media assets in the Purgation State (far ahead of the second-largest media empire, that of the aristocratic De Sablé family, which controls an estimated 25-30% of all Purgation media-related assets and going concerns, forming a de facto right-wing propagandist duopoly over Purgation media output and consumption), with the pioneer Reimonde Courvoisier being worth an estimated US$41.1 billion as was estimated by Forbes in 2020. The current fourth-generation members of the Du Roussillon-Courvoisier family (as joined by the marriage of Rainier Courvoisier and Éléonore du Roussillon in 2018) are considered Mélangé by virtue of the Les Enfants du Ciel status of their mother and the merely Sain status of their father. While these extremely young children (Algernon du Roussillon-Courvoisier was born in 2020 and Quentín du Roussillon-Courvoisier was born in 2022) are not yet old enough to have entered 'high society' proper, and thus the degree of respect or deference that would be accorded to them by the Purgation cultural elite has not been tested in practice, nevertheless, it is very likely that, given the above confluence of factors, they would be accorded at least begrudging respect, prestige, and esteem by the broad majority of the Les Enfants du Ciel aristocracy, due to the extremely high level of wealth, power, and influence wielded by the Courvoisier family, whose far-right media empire had played a major role in bringing the PNL regime to power and the propaganda of which remains critical in preserving the continued hold onto political power of the present PNL ruling government. However, given the absence of any unusually high prestige and esteem enjoyed by the aristocratic Du Roussillon clan and the relatively humble origins of the nouveau riche Courvoisier family, there is likely to be some modicum of at least a residual air of superiority harboured by the more traditionalist and über-elitist members of the Les Enfants du Ciel aristocracy against the family's Mélangé offspring, even if such sentiments are not openly expressed or overtly directed at the Mélangé children in question.

And lastly, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, for an example of when a (speculated) Mélangé procreative union may be treated with outright disdain and hostility, one need only consider the flurry of damaging and reputation-destroying rumours levelled against the De La Pierre family during the height of its 2018-2020 social downfall. Of the numerous spurious and largely unsubstantiated allegations flung against the De La Pierre main branch family members by the far-right Courvoisier-owned and De Sablé-controlled right-wing media outlets in June-October 2018, many of such allegations included claims either challenging the true parentage of various family members or making claims of various members harbouring so-called 'secret families' or 'hidden offspring', inclusive of, inter alia, an allegation in the 25 July 2018 edition of La Voix du Royaume that the De La Pierre patriarch (Marc-Henri de la Pierre) was not, in fact, the true biological father of the scion (Louis de la Pierre) because his lawful wife 'stepped out' on their marriage and regularly slept with various members of the household staff, one of whom was the true biological father of Louis, and thus Louis (as well as all his siblings, including Gérard and Casimir) were 'mere Mélangé spawn', and another allegation in the 14 August 2018 edition of La Petite Auxiliorienne that Louis de la Pierre had been harbouring 'at least two secret families' from his wife (Juliette-Élise de la Pierre) and had 'produced a whole brood of at least four or five Mélangé litter together with a minimum of two churlish floozies off the inner streets of Ravaliér'. In these circumstances, the term Mélangé was being used in a derisive and derogatory fashion to imply an offspring of lesser or inferior quality, but not because a Mélangé is always, ipso facto, regarded as socially or inherently 'less-than' by virtue of that genetic status alone, but due to the surrounding circumstances which supplemented additional stigmatising elements to such alleged cross-caste procreations, including the presence of adulterous affairs, out-of-wedlock illegitimate 'bastard' children, the other Sain parent being of a poorer, lower-class status whilst lacking in any individual and/or familial prestige, amongst other such considerations.

In short, whether a Mélangé child conceived between a Les Enfants du Ciel parent and a merely genetically ordinary Sain parent is regarded as socially equal or inferior to the members of the elite Les Enfants du Ciel aristocratic racial-genetic caste is a highly fact-sensitive question which will depend on the precise circumstances of the conception and the relative esteem and prestige enjoyed by both parents and their respective households of origin.

In terms of the correlation between the Génétiquement Mélangé racial-genetic caste and the concept of 'race' as commonly understood outside of the Purgation State (as referring to geographical or continental clines), White Purgations remain a slightly overrepresented ethnic group amongst even the Mélangé, although that disproportionate over-representation is of a lesser degree and extent than that of the Les Enfants du Ciel, with White Purgations making up an estimated 86-89% of Mélangé households (compared to 83.6% of the general Purgation population). The remaining 11-14% of the Mélangé, however, are generally racially Mixed between 'White Purgation' and some other ethnicity (far in excess of the percentage of persons in the Purgation populace identifying as racially ‘Mixed’, standing at around 2.2%), by virtue of the fact that a Mélangé individual is, by definition, at least partially related by blood and consanguinity to a Les Enfants du Ciel household, which are overwhelmingly of a White Purgation background. Amongst the 'Mixed-Race' Mélangé individuals, however, a wide and diverse variety of ethnic groups and identities are present amongst that community, with a good number of partially White Other Mélangé (4-5%) (such as Slavic, Baltic, Dinaric, Iberian, Jewish, and Mediterranean White sub-groups), partially Black Purgation Mélangé (3-4%) (inclusive of African and Carribbean Black sub-groups), partially South Asian Mélangé (2-3%) (including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sinhalese, and Afghan sub-groups), partially East Asian Mélangé (1-2%) (e.g., Han Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, etc.), and partially Arab Mélangé (~1%), amongst others.

The greater ethnic diversity amongst the Mixed-Race Mélangé as compared to that of the Mixed-Race Les Enfants du Ciel is attributable to the much greater variety of backgrounds of the ordinary Sain households that a Les Enfants du Ciel member or branch may have inter-bred and procreated with, running the whole gamut and spectrum of differing household incomes, personal net worth, socio-economic status, familial or professional prestige, and with some hailing from an 'old money' or a 'new money' family or even from far less economically fortunate family circumstances altogether, resulting in a much broader variety of the ethnic groups that a Les Enfants du Ciel individual or familial branch may have bred or 'mixed' with so as to consequently produce a Mélangé offspring or an entire Mélangé familial branch of an existing La Maison du Ciel, depending on the exact circumstances of such procreation.

by **Purgatio** » Sat Sep 09, 2023 7:11 pm

Génétiquement Sain (~84-86% of all Purgation households)

The Génétiquement Sain (sometimes referred to as just Sain for short) are, by far, the largest of the four Purgation racial-genetic castes, composed of around 84-86% of all Purgation households and making up the vast majority of the Purgation populace, consisting of anywhere from 1.9 to 2 billion individuals within the Purgation State. With such a broad and wide swathe of persons falling under this taxonomical umbrella, the degree of socio-cultural prestige and privilege enjoyed by individual Sain persons or households differs drastically from person to person, and their experiences within the Purgation social hierarchy are simply so diverse and variegated as to resist any easy classification or generalisation. The one socio-legal fact which unites all Sain persons, however, is that they are classified as Sain rather than Dysfonctionnel within the PIGC's Auspex Operandi algorithm, meaning that they are not regarded by the national DNA database's algorithmic classifications as possessing any excessive inherent or innate genetic-biological tendency towards a whole host of 'disordered', 'dysfunctional', or socially 'parasitical' behaviours deemed to be unacceptably injurious to the well-being of the national people's community, including criminality, vandalism or rioting, terrorism, insurgency, physical or mental disabilities, psychological disorders, chronic substance addiction, vagrancy, persistent unemployment, welfare dependency, or absence of economic self-sufficiency or self-reliance, morbid obesity, feeble-mindedness or intellectual impairments, amongst many other such 'undesirable' traits and characteristics.

Consequently, the one accurate generalisation which may be made about the relative position of the Sain within the Purgation State's racial-genetic social hierarchy is that the Sain are all socially and legally privileged, within Purgation society, but in a negative sense only and not in a positive sense. In other words, the one universal social privilege enjoyed by all Sain individuals is their freedom from the persecution, oppression, and genetic discrimination suffered by persons classified as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel, and to that limited extent, it is accurate to say that all Sain persons in the Purgation State are socially privileged simply by virtue of their belonging to the Sain racial-genetic caste. That, however, is where the social similarities decidedly come to an end.

In terms of the relative social position that is occupied by individual Sain persons and households within the gradations of prestige and power enjoyed along the hierarchical ladder of the Purgation State's dominant racial-genetic caste system, experiences vary widely due to the diverse and heterogenous characteristics and backgrounds of different individuals of Sain classification. Much will depend upon a Sain individual's wealth, class, and socio-economic status. More detailed examination of the Purgation class system will be performed as its own dedicated sub-category; however, it suffices to state that there is a whole spectrum of prestige and power enjoyed by persons of Sain classification, ranging widely across a very broad spectrum indeed. On one extreme end of the spectrum, you have upper-class 'old money' Sain households who may enjoy immense socio-cultural proximity to the 'high society' circles of the elite Les Enfants du Ciel aristocratic caste, living in the same exclusionary gated communities as these households, sending their children to the same elite, prestigious, and highly-selective private high schools (L'Académie d'Excellence Scolaire de Savoy-Ducasse and L'École de la Fondation d'Amboise pour les Prodiges) and universities (L'Université de Savoy-Ducasse and L'Université de Pétrus), being members of the same prestigious associations and organisations (such as Le Country Club de l'Île Impériale and Le Club Poney et Gazon Équestre), attending the same exclusive 'high society' events, charitable galas, exclusive luncheons and dinners, thus regularly interacting and rubbing shoulders with them at important social functions, and thereby reaping the benefits of residual or reflected social and cultural capital just by virtue of their socio-cultural proximity to that elite caste. By virtue of such proximity, such upper-class 'old money' Sain families stand a potential chance of seeing their future descendants even ascending into the Mélangé or Du Ciel castes themselves (although this is still an incredibly rare feat), if they play their cards right, network and form the right connections at elite 'high society' events, make friends with the right families, procure and arrange the proper marriages and unions for their children, and meticulously curate the social lives and professional journeys of their descendants to avoid scandal and attain prestige and honour within the eyes of Purgation society's dominant cultural elite. In fact, for the Sain upper-class families who already enjoy the privileges of 'old money' or established inter-generational wealth, and who hold leading, high-ranking, and prestigious positions within the country's top educational, artistic, cultural, or social and charitable institutions, there is always a good chance that one of their members can ascend to the Les Enfants du Ciel caste at an even faster pace if said member becomes engaged to a Les Enfants du Ciel family member, and that fiancé(e)'s application to be included in that household's official 'family register' is then sponsored by the Les Enfants du Ciel family in question and accepted by the PIGC - but, of course, this is always entirely subject to the ultimate untrammelled discretion of the PIGC, which may reject that application on the basis of the 'insufficient prestige' and insufficiently impressive 'genetic quality' of the bloodline, descent, and lineage of the applicant fiancé(e).

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, however, you also have impoverished, economically-insecure lower-class Sain households, living in deprived neighbourhoods, subjected to heavy State surveillance by the Home Office's surveillance apparatus and a very dense militarised police presence in their high-crime communities, who are in much closer proximity, socio-culturally speaking, to the oppressed Dysfonctionnel than the elite Les Enfants du Ciel households that make up the Purgation State's culturally dominant haut monde. For the most socio-economically deprived and disadvantaged of the Sain, they are often only one wrong move or one bad day away from becoming Dysfonctionnel themselves, they may be arrested by a police officer for public disorder, public nuisance, public disturbance or some other public order offence and deemed to be a 'vandal' engaged in riotous conduct, they may be living paycheque-to-paycheque in an unstable hand-to-mouth existence and losing their job may be all that is required for them to be evicted from their rental accommodation, becoming a long-term unemployed vagrant reduced to begging, panhandling, and a wanderer or vagabond lifestyle to survive, or they may suffer a chronic addiction to all sorts of addictive psychoactive substances (nicotine, alcohol, opioids, etc.) and end up being 'caught' by a paramedic or doctor for having an 'elective lifestyle disease' when they are found to have liver cirrhosis, ephysema, lung cancer, seizures or psychosis from opioid addiction, and get 'reported' to PICOS or the PIGC as an 'addled', 'incontinent' Dysfonctionnel. For the most economically under-privileged of the Sain, their negative privileges, as someone spared from the oppression and persecution of the Dysfonctionnel, are a transient, ephemeral, and most unstable and insecure status indeed.

This point about relative socio-cultural proximity to the other racial-genetic castes, and the potential for genetic re-classification, is an appropriate juncture to provide an important and necessary clarification. It has been argued by some sociologists that the Purgation State's racial-genetic caste system is not a 'caste system' in the true sense of that phrase, since a 'caste' is generally understood to refer to a purely hereditary and transmissible social status, within a socially stratified order, that is separate, discrete, fixed, immutable, and unchanging, and therefore the ability of a person presently classified as merely Sain to become Les Enfants du Ciel upon a successful application to the PIGC or Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel upon a 're-classification order' being rendered by the TECON-TECAT tribunal system must mean that the Purgation State's stratified genetic classes are not immutable and immovable 'castes' in the true sense of that word. This argument has merit, and whether one agrees with this view must depend, in large part, on whether one regards the notion of 'caste' to be defined by the internal socio-cultural perception of the caste-based society in question or an outside external examination of the stability of the social position and status ascribed to individual persons within the caste-based culture under scrutiny. This is because, within the internal logic of the Purgation State's worldview, a so-called 'genetic re-classification' is not, in fact, a change in a person's genetic status or a shift in a person's racial-genetic caste from one class to another. Rather, it is a case of the system 'discovering' a person's true genotypical variety which they have always possessed, within their biological constitution, since the day of their birth, which has only been recently proven, as a legal and regulatory matter, with reference to any new phenotypical 'evidence' or recent emergent 'manifestations' which the system can now reference in aid to determine their true genetic status all along. In that sense, one's racial-genetic status is always fixed, immutable, and unchanging, at least within the eyes of the Purgation State. A person who puts in a successful application to be entered into a PIGC Les Enfants du Ciel 'family register' was always Les Enfants du Ciel since birth, and the PIGC has 'discovered' their status as such by virtue of new information and evidence being brought to its attention. Likewise, a person re-classified by the TECON-TECAT tribunal system as Dysfonctionnel was always Dysfonctionnel from birth, it is simply that the TECON-TECAT tribunals and the Auspex Operandi algorithm did not have the information or evidence of that 'true' status of theirs until their 'disordered' tendencies manifested externally and phenotypically in the form of whatever 'antisocial' or 'parasitical' behaviour the respondent engaged in to merit genetic re-classification in the eyes of the TECON-TECAT tribunal judges, who have utilised that phenotypical expression as evidence to 'discover' the respondent's true permanent genetic classification all along. Hence, within the internal logic of the Purgation State's prevailing socio-cultural worldview, the four (or three) genetic classifications are fixed, immutable, and unchanging racial-genetic castes, not fluid or changing social classes which persons may enter into or exit therefrom.

From that internal perspective, it is more accurate, then, to state that amongst the persons presently classified as Sain, there is a broad spectrum in terms of their relative socio-cultural proximity to other castes within the Purgation State's racial-genetic caste system, based in large part upon an individual Sain person's wealth, income, occupational prestige, residential neighbourhood, educational attainment, and their socio-economic status overall. The relative privilege and prestige enjoyed by a Sain individual within the Purgation State's racial-genetic caste system therefore runs the entire gamut from a highly privileged Sain with immense cultural proximity and a wealth of social connections to the elite Les Enfants du Ciel caste, on the one hand, to an extremely disadvantaged and socio-economically precarious Sain who is only one wrong step away from becoming Dysfonctionnel themselves, with the overwhelming majority of Sain households falling somewhere in the middle between these two respective extremes.

As for the relationship or correlation between the Sain racial-genetic caste and the notion of 'race' as is commonly understood outside of the Purgation cultural context (as referring to continental or geographical clines), the White Purgation ethnic group is slightly overrepresented amongst the Sain social caste, making up an estimated 88-90% of its members whilst comprising an estimated 83.6% of the general Purgation population. In contrast, most ethnic minorities witihin the Purgation State are vastly under-represented amongst the Sain community, including Black Purgations, Arab Purgations, many White Other sub-groups (i.e., Slavic, Baltic, Dinaric, other Eastern Europeans, Mediterranean, Romani, Iberian, Turkic, Iranic, etc.), many South Asian Purgation sub-groups (viz., Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sinhalese, Nepalese, and Afghan sub-groups), certain Southeast Asian sub-groups (Hmong, Filipino, Thai, Malay, Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese, Burmese, etc.), certain East Asian sub-groups (such as Mongolians, Manchus, Tibetans, Formosans, etc.), amongst others. These ethnic minorities together comprise around 12-14% of the general Purgation population, but made up an estimated 6-8% of the composition of the Sain population. Only a small handful of ethnic minority groups are actually slightly over-represented in the Sain demographic rather than under-represented, including many White Other sub-groups (mostly Jewish, Nordic, Germanic, Celtic, Norman, certain other Gallo-Romance groups in Northern and Western Europe), many East Asians (viz., Han Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), many South Asians (especially the Indian sub-groups, and in particular, the Indo-Aryan Northern Indians such as the Hindis and Punjabis), amongst others, making up an estimated 4-5% of the Sain population whilst consisting of around 3-4% of the general Purgation population as a whole.

The main reason for these ethnic differences in the make-up and demographic composition of the Sain is, as can be expected, the relative racial and ethnic representation of the Purgation Dysfonctionnel population, which is, in turn, influenced by socio-economic factors (given the strong relationship between socio-economic status and the various stigmatised traits and behavioural characteristics making-up the 'parasitical tendencies' of the Dysfonctionnel) and the average differences in the mean and median household incomes of different racial and ethnic groups in the Purgation State alongside other socio-economic indicators (including household wealth, residential neighbourhood, and educational attainment, amongst others), resulting in racial and ethnic disproportionalities existing within both the Sain and Dysfonctionnel communities. The relationship between the Purgation Sain-Dysfonctionnel distinction and that of 'race' as commonly understood outside the Purgation cultural context is perhaps better explored in the context of the discussion regarding the final category of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel within the Purgation State's racial-genetic hierarchy.

by **Purgatio** » Sat Sep 09, 2023 7:48 pm

Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel (~14-16% of all Purgation households)

Finally, the lowest, most oppressed and highly persecuted of the four (or three) Purgation racial-genetic castes is, of course, the social caste of the Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel (often referred to as just Dysfonctionnel for short), forming the maligned under-class or the demonised and powerless subaltern sub-group occupying the bottom-most strata of the Purgation State's prevailing socio-cultural hierarchy. The socio-legal definition of a Dysfonctionnel is simple, persons can either be officially classified as Dysfonctionnel based upon a 'genotypical examination' or a 'phenotypical examination'. The difference between these two methods of classification shall each be explored in turn.

A person is Dysfonctionnel by virtue of a 'genotypical examination' if their DNA and genetic profile, as registered in the prevailing national DNA database and the Auspex Operandi algorithm which analyses all data points within that database, classifies a given person's DNA profile as Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel as opposed to Génétiquement Sain. The Auspex Operandi algorithmic model follows an analytical methodology of forensic epidemiology and metadata analysis, comparing the entire genetic profiles of the 'genetically healthy' against persons recognised as displaying 'deviant', 'antisocial', or 'parasitical' tendencies - and that latter category, in accordance with PIGC Order No. 86 of 1998 (the "Genetic Identification Ordinance"), is given a broad and very wide scope, and includes 'vandals' (referring to disorderly and disruptive persons injurious to the social order and harmony of the national community, including hooligans, rioters, delinquents, gangsters, terrorists, insurgents, communists, political dissidents, criminals, and other persons deemed to be engaged in disruptive or antisocial behaviour), 'cripples' (referring to physically and/or mentally disabled persons), 'vagrants' (referring to the homeless, panhandlers, travellers, wanderers, vagabonds, anyone whose lifestyle involves roaming about public spaces without visible means of personal economic support and self-sufficience), 'work-shy mooches and leeches' (referring to anyone under long-term unemployment and/or long-term dependency on welfare, charity, or other forms of social assistance, or anyone else deemed to be incapable of individual economic self-reliance or self-sustenance in the long run), the 'insane and unsound' (referring to persons afflicted with psychological disorders or mental illnesses), the 'addled and incontinent' (referring to persons pathologically drawn to self-destructive behaviours such as chronic substance addiction to nicotine, alcohol, or psychoactive drugs, to an extreme extent such that the addict is deemed to lack the personal capacity to control their intake and engage in normal healthy productive activities or lead a fruitful life), the 'indolent and slothful' (referring to physically unhealthy persons and, in particular, morbidly obese persons for a sustained and prolonged period of time, such that they are deemed to be pathologically lazy and/or self-destructive in their absence of personal discipline or capacity for impulse-control), and the 'imbecilic, retarded, and feeble-minded' (referring to intellectually disabled persons and persons found to have a 'very low' IQ of anything below 70). Such persons are deemed to be 'genetically disordered', to possess a biological-genetic constitution that is pathologically and perversely inclined towards 'parasitical' behaviours which are burdensome and injurious to the fruitfulness and productivity of the national community. Hence, where persons are found to be 'disordered' owing to the display of such traits or tendencies, they are reflected as such within the national DNA database. The Auspex Operandi algorithm then compares the genetic profiles of all persons registered as 'healthy' and all persons registered as 'disordered', searching for statistical deviations between the data points of the two classes of DNA profiles, identifying genetic alleles and loci which are much more or much less likely to appear in one class as opposed to the other. Once these 'statistical deviations' are identified and compiled into a metadata analytical model, as part of its 'iterative process', the Auspex Operandi algorithmic analysis is then re-applied to all the genetic profiles within the national DNA database, with the intent of identifying and singling-out any genetic profiles which possess numerous alleles associated with the Dysfonctionnel whilst lacking numerous alleles associated with the Sain, repeatedly and to a statistically significant degree. Such genetic profiles, once identified, are deemed to have been 'genotypically examined' and found to be Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel by reason of the contents of their genetic profile, and hence are classified as such.

On the other hand, a person may be Dysfonctionnel by virtue of a 'phenotypical examination' if, despite being classified as Sain by the Auspex Operandi, they are found to have engaged in one or more of the abovementioned traits and behaviours and are consequently found by a TECON or TECAT tribunal to have externally manifested and 'phenotypically expressed' their internal, innate 'genetically disordered' tendencies through their external conduct, thereby demonstrating that they are, in fact, truly Dysfonctionnel as opposed to Sain. In such a scenario, the person will be re-classified as Dysfonctionnel within the Auspex Operandi by virtue of a TECON or TECAT tribunal decision being rendered which orders such a 'genetic re-classification'. As part of the system's 'iterative process', that new data-point will be accounted for and accommodated within the algorithmic model of the Auspex Operandi, and re-applied in its analysis of the prevailing genetic profiles within the national DNA database.

All persons classified as Dysfonctionnel, whether by way of a 'genotypical examination' or 'phenotypical examination', are automatically deprived of their Purgation State citizenship by virtue of Magnificus Dominus Executive Order (EO) No. 46 of 1991 (the "1991 Political Compromise"), and are instead regarded as mere 'subjects of the Royaume', subject to the jurisdiction and governance of the Purgation State but deprived of all the ordinary civil and political rights enjoyed by Purgation State citizens, including the right to own land or shares in publicly-listed companies, the right to hold public or governmental office, the right to join professional bodies or associations, various rights of legal standing and procedural protection before the legal system, the right to benefit from any public services, rights of abode and free internal movement, and any rights to exercise any and all political freedoms within the nation whatsoever (including by joining a political party, joining or forming a labour union or any social or cultural organisation, organising or participating in any public assembly, demonstration, protest, or petition, the right to demand good administration of public bodies before a governmental ombudsman or administrative court, amongst many others). Moreover, ever since the enactment of Magnificus Dominus Executive Order (EO) No. 103 of 1994 (the "Dysfonctionnel Nationwide Liquidation Decree"), the fate of a Dysfonctionnel is to be transferred to one of the Purgation State's over 49,000 'liquidation facilities' (or des facilités de liquidation), to suffer genocidal extermination and eradication through a planned regimen of 'liquidation through labour' - to ultimately perish through a lethal combination of overwork, exhaustion, abuse, maltreatment, poor health from unhygienic and unsanitary conditions, and malnutrition. The average life expectancy of a Dysfonctionnel prisoner once hovered around 22-24 years following their transfer to a 'liquidation facility' when the concentration camps were under the control of PICOS; however, ever since the 'mass privatisation' of the facilities in long-term 'concession contracts' to for-profit private actors, the average life expectancy of a Dysfonctionnel prisoner rose slightly within the camps under private corporate control to around 24-26 years post-detention in the immediate aftermath of mass privatisation (in order to squeeze out maximum profits from each 'asset' or the forced labour of the Dysfonctionnel detainees), and has steadily climbed since to an approximate post-detention life expectancy of 28-31 years today, although the quality of life endured by the Dysfonctionel prisoner remains no less brutish, tortuous, and miserable than before. All Dysfonctionnel prisoners are subject to forced sterilisation upon their transfer to a 'liquidation facility', and in addition to the usual regimen of forced labour and physical abuse by PICOS guards and troopers to compel and coerce compliance with the prevailing 'liquidation through labour' regimen, detainees may be singled-out for unethical and forced experimentations for a whole host of purposes, including by private companies testing new pharmaceutical products, agricultural chemicals, surgical techniques, or medical devices, or military and security agencies testing tortuous 'enhanced interrogation' techniques, new military equipment, weaponry, poisons, biological or chemical weapons, or newly synthesised substances of pharmacological torture, or the efficacy of various mind-control or mind-altering psychoactive substances, amongst other such experiments.

Additionally, ever since the enactment of PICOS Order No. 344 of 1999 ("PO 344/1999"), as codified in Magnificus Dominus Executive Order (EO) No. 312 of 1999, hospital staff, including doctors, nurses, and midwives, are required in engage in the mandatory genetic testing of foetuses and newborns, with any foetuses identified as Dysfonctionnel to be compulsorily aborted, and any newborns identified as Dysfonctionnel to be compulsorily euthanasied. Persons found to have conceived or produced more than three Dysfonctionnel foetuses or newborns within their lifetime were to be mandatorily sterilised under PO 344/1999 as well. Consequently, the Dysfonctionnel community as a whole is presently being subjected to a nationwide programme of systematic State-sanctioned eradication and extermination of their racial-genetic class, through a combination of 'physical genocide' (i.e., physical destruction of the group through deliberate or calculated means) and 'biological genocide' (i.e., erasing future generations of a group through the curtailing of the reproduction and perpetuation thereof). It is estimated that, at present, the number of Dysfonctionnel imprisoned within the Purgation State's 'liquidation facilities' and currently undergoing a brutal regimen of 'liquidation through labour' ranges from 338.33 million persons on the low end to 380.65 million persons on the high end. Due to a combination of prisoners dying slowly and gradually from the prevailing 'liquidation through labour' régime, coupled with the influx of newly re-classified detainees from the TECON-TECAT tribunal system, the number of Dysfonctionnel prisoners has generally stabilised within that range in the past few years.

While those statistics are the Home Office's 2023 official estimates of the numbers of Dysfonctionnel prisoners teeming within the nation's concentration camps and 'liquidation facilities' as they fluctuated throughout the financial year of 2022, it is not known how many more Dysfonctionnel exist beyond those which have been identified, apprehended, and subjected to 'liquidation through labour' by the Purgation State. Many other Dysfonctionnel exist throughout the nation who have managed to evade detection or escaped from State custody through a variety of means, some were harboured at birth by anti-government or anti-eugenic parents who deliberately avoided attending maternity check-ups at hospitals and underwent the process of a 'natural birth' - with all the attendant medical risks inhered therein - simply to evade and dodge any genetic tests being performed upon their infant and new-born. Others were hidden by opposition-friendly doctors, nurses, or midwives who protected them once it was discovered that they were, in fact, Dysfonctionnel. Others managed to escape from custody and dodge apprehension by PICOS guards, PPF officers, or Purification Order paramilitaries, and escaped to the less densely-populated outskirts of the country where governmental surveillance and control is generally weaker. Others were born to Dysfonctionnel parents within the GEM insurgency movement and have only ever known a life of hiding, running, evasion and subterfuge, living secretly in the shadows under an ongoing militant opposition campaign. A substantial and not insignificant minority, however, have liberated themselves, in 'slave rebellions' within PICOS-guarded concentration camps, staging successful co-ordinated revolts which overwhelmed their corporate handlers, cruel company taskmasters and work supervisors, prison officers, and the PICOS troopers standing guard outside the gates or on the perimeter of the facility. The Home Office's 2023 report estimated that, throughout the year 2022, over 481 'liquidation facilities' were beset by attempted revolts of a critical mass of brave Dysfonctionnel forced labourers who attempted to overrun and overpower their armed enforcers through sheer mass and numbers alone. Most of these were put-down brutally and forcefully (463 attempted 'slave revolts'), with the perpetrators and agitators subjected to a nightmarish cocktail of physical assault, pharmacological torture, chemically-induced hallucinations, sleep deprivations, their lifespans medically propped-up and sustained for the sole purpose of forcing them to suffer in retaliation for their attempted uprising and to ensure that their fate would be far more hellish, brutish, and tortuous than that of an ordinary Dysfonctionnel forced labourer, as a deterrent to the others. The revolts and mass uprisings which were successful (18 of them), however, saw over 39,000 PICOS troopers, corporate handlers, company work supervisors, and other prison guards and employees slaughtered and massacred, with over 135,000 Dysfonctionnel liberated as they fled to the outskirts of the country before they could be rounded-up and apprehended, many of whom likely joined the swelling ranks of the GEM insurgency or at least sought refuge and protection therefrom, costing PICOS and the various private sector concessionaires billions of Élites in expended security costs alone (not even counting the damages from the 'lost profits' of these facilities).

It is not known for certain how many unenslaved, uncaptured Dysfonctionnel teem and roam about the territory of the Purgation State, but human rights groups and international observers have made estimates (or, more accurately, wild guesses) that the number may range from around 10-11 million on the low end to 35-40 million on the high end. Many of these 'free' Dysfonctionnel persons live in hiding, away from the densely-populated cities and often in smaller villages, hamlets, or little towns to avoid being caught up in PICOS or Purification Order raids, or have fled to join the GEM insurgency and are hiding away in secretive and concealed GEM safehouses and bunkers. Maintaining control over the Dysfonctionnel is not an easy task, however, and it costs the Purgation State hundreds of billions (if not trillions, in some years) of Élites annually simply to maintain order and security in 'liquidation facilities', scrutinise and survey densely-populated cities for runaways and stowaways, perform random surprise raids, 'stops and searches', and 'door-to-door' searches combing and sweeping various cities to locate hideaway Dysfonctionnel, monitor the medical community's compliance with PO 344/1999 and the mandatory genetic tests on foetuses and newborn infants imposed therein, not to mention the ongoing cost of defending 'liquidation facilities' from both 'slave revolts' and GEM 'liberation raids' alike. However, at this point, the entire legitimacy of the PNL regime rests upon its supposed recognition of, and corresponding capacity to, tame and keep at bay the existential threat and menace of the Dysfonctionnel elements of the Purgation community that threaten to destroy the nation if left unchecked, not to mention the continued support of the wealthy business community as maintained through low taxes and profitable 'concession contracts' which can only be maintained and preserved through the continued genocidal enslavement and liquidation of the Dysfonctionnel. Thus, as costly as these 'slave revolts' and the ongoing GEM insurgency may be, in both fiscal terms as well as in terms of human life or material and logistical commitment, it is a price that the Purgation State has no choice but to pay if the PNL regime wishes to remain in power.

The main and primary victims of the ongoing genocidal extermination and enslavement of the Dysfonctionnel by the Purgation State are, of course, the oppressed and persecuted Dysfonctionnel themselves; however, ancillary or incidental impositions are placed upon the ordinary Sain in order to maintain this continued Sain-Dysfonctionnel distinction in practice, including many curtailments of regular civil liberties, through a massive Home Office surveillance apparatus and expanded powers of warrantless search and seizure accorded to various law enforcement bodies and security agencies as needed to practically and efficaciously root-out and identify Dysfonctionnel persons throughout various neighbourhoods and communities, not to mention the requirements for the medical community to participate in mandatory genetic testing and forced abortions, euthanasia, and sterilisations in PO 344/1999 and the criminal prohibition upon all marriages, procreations, and sexual relations between Sain and Dysfonctionnel persons in the infamous Magnificus Dominus Executive Order (EO) No. 41/1990 ("EO 41/1990"), the first ever discriminatory piece of legislation enacted against the Dysfonctionnel by the PNL Purgation regime. The continued socio-legal distinction between the Sain and Dysfonctionnel is therefore a tenuous and socially constructed artifice, one which has to be maintained through a steady stream of PNL-aligned media propaganda, propagandist anti-Dysfonctionnel education, and pro-PNL State terror, intimidation, and repression. Both the continued rebelliousness and violent insurgency of the Dysfonctionnel, and the increasing numbers of Sain individuals (especially more liberal-minded young people) who may be unconvinced or unpersuaded as to the truth of the Sain-Dysfonctionnel distinction upon which the very legitimacy of the present ruling PNL regime is founded, pose a credible threat to the continued stability of the ruling PNL government and demonstrates the political and social vulnerabilities of the present government's continued persecution, oppression, and genocidal enslavement and extermination of this intensely marginalised subaltern community.

One of the more socially thorny subjects, when it comes to discussing the social position of the Dysfonctionnel within the Purgation State's social order, is the correlation and connection between the Dysfonctionnel racial-genetic caste (as defined within the laws and regulations of the Purgation State) and the concept of 'race' as is more commonly understood outside of Purgation society (as referring to geographical or continental clines). Many ethnic minorities are disproportionately over-represented within the Dysfonctionnel category, including Black Purgations (including African, Caribbean, and Afro-Latino sub-categories), certain White Other communities (such as, inter alia, the Slavic, Baltic, Dinaric, other Eastern European, Mediterranean, Iberian, Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Turkic, Iranic, and Romani sub-groups, amongst others), certain South Asian groups (including Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Sinhalese, and Afghan sub-categories), certain Southeast Asian sub-groups (including Hmong, Cambodian, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Laotian, Malay, Filipino, and other Austronesian sub-categories, etc.), certain East Asian sub-categories (like Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchus, Formosan, Ainu, and Ryukyuan sub-communities), Arab Purgations (including West Asian and North African sub-groups), and self-identified 'Mixed' or 'Mixed-Race' Purgations inclusive of some combination of the above ethnicities. It has been estimated that these ethnic minority communities are composed of approximately 12-14% of the general Purgation populace, yet make up around 47-49% of the Dysfonctionnel community, 3-4 times that of their overall representation in the general population. The main reasons for this over-representation are socio-economic factors attributable to the entrenched historical inequalities within Purgation society. Poverty and unemployment rates have generally been, on average, higher amongst most ethnic minority communities in Purgatio as compared to that amongst the Purgation population as a whole, and within the White Purgation racial majority in particular. A combination of historical discrimination, racial segregationist policies, entrenched inequalities between neighbourhoods and school districts, transferred inter-generational inequalities through inheritances and little to no capital taxation, meant that when the PNL seized power over the Purgation State in their coup of 1987-1988, the poverty rate amongst ethnic minorities was generally 2-3 times more than that of the poverty rate amongst White Purgations. Given the strong correlation and relationship between poverty and socio-economic deprivation, on the one hand, and many of the demonised and stigmatised traits of the Dysfonctionnel (criminality, vagrancy, welfare dependency, substance addiction, morbid obesity, mental illness, etc.), on the other, poorer, low-income, and unemployed Purgations were significantly more likely to be caught up in 'surprise raids', 'public stops and searches', and 'door-to-door searches' for so-called Dysfonctionnel persons, which in turn meant that many ethnic minorities belonging to comparatively deprived communities in which rates of poverty and unemployment were higher than the national average ended up being heavily over-represented amongst the persons seized and identified by law enforcement bodies as Dysfonctionnel, a trend that was only worsened and reinforced by the racial profiling often employed, be it openly or tacitly or even subconsciously, by conventional PPF Police officers, PICOS troopers, Purification Order paramilitaries, and the far-right vigilante volontaire auxiliaires before them.

In contrast, while White Purgations make up 83.6% of the general Purgation population, they have been estimated to make up only around 50-52% of the entire Dysfonctionnel community, a disproportionate under-representation which is likewise attributable to historical inequalities and socio-economic factors, and the fact that the poverty rate and unemployment rate amongst White Purgations were generally lower than that of the national average and much lower than that amongst most ethnic minority communities. A very small number of non-White Purgation ethnic minorities were also under-represented amongst the Dysfonctionnel, these included certain White Other sub-groups (including Jewish, Nordic, Germanic, Norman, and Finno-Ugric sub-groups as well as other Gallo-Romance sub-groups from Western or Northern Europe), certain South Asian sub-groups (namely Indians, especially Indo-Aryan Northern Indians such as the Hindis and Punjabis), certain East Asian sub-groups (viz., the Han Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sub-categories), these handful of ethnic minorities in the Purgation State are often referred to by sociologists and anthropologists as 'market dominant minorities', with lower average rates of poverty and unemployment than that of the national average, comprising an estimated 3-4% of the Purgation population as a whole whilst making up under 1% of the Dysfonctionnel community.

It should be noted, however, that the above are only broad statistical averages between large group categories and refer only to differences in the degree of over-representation or under-representation of a racial or ethnic group within the broad Dysfonctionnel category as compared to their overall numbers within the general Purgation population as a whole. The term Dysfonctionnel is no more a substitute for 'ethnic minority Purgation' than the term Sain is a substitute for 'White Purgation'. There are, of course, many upper-class or middle-class ethnic minority Purgations who are not in poverty or unemployed, hail from a higher-to-middle-income household, and are comfortably within the Sain racial-genetic caste, whereas there are also many White Purgations (especially poorer, lower-income White Purgations) who are within the Dysfonctionnel classification - in fact, a simple majority of the Dysfonctionnel community (~50-52%) are members of the White Purgation racial group.

It is this reality, in fact, which allowed the PNL party to rise to power by putting out anti-Dysfonctionnel propaganda which allowed the far-right PNL politicians to get the best of both worlds and have their cake and eat it too, when it comes to exploiting the fractiousness and fissures of pre-PNL Purgation ethnic and racial politics. Since ethnic minorities were merely over-represented amongst the Dysfonctionnel, but there was no perfect one-to-one correlation between ethnic minorities and the Dysfonctionnel classification per se, anti-Dysfonctionnel rhetoric, demonisation, and propaganda could be used to appeal to racial prejudices amongst certain segments of the White Purgation populace whilst maintaining plausible deniability that the PNL party was decidedly not a white supremacist or white nationalist political force and harboured no hostility or animus towards non-White Purgations. The demonisation of the Dysfonctionnel as violent criminals, seditious terrorists, lazy and indolent vagrants, parasitical mooches and leeches overly dependent upon welfare and social services, appealed to many pre-existing stereotypes many White Purgations harboured about various ethnic minority communities, including and especially Black Purgations, Arab Purgations, many South Asian Purgations (and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in particular), and certain White Other groups as well (including the Romani, Slavic, other Eastern European, and Mediterranean sub-groups). By putting out political rhetoric promising to 'curtail' and 'combat' the so-called 'parasitical tendencies' of the Dysfonctionnel, racially animated White Purgations would be quietly comforted and assured that various ethnic minority communities they harboured fears and anxieties over would be properly quelled and quashed under the banner of the Dysfonctionnel, while many average non-White Purgations and the more 'respectable' White Purgations within so-called 'polite society' would not be turned away and alienated by the brazen expression of any open racial hostility or explicit race-based bigotry against various racial and ethnic minorities within the Purgation State, owing to the employment of the theoretically race-neutral category of the Dysfonctionnel. Any accusations of racism or bigotry against ethnic minorities could be easily batted away by pointing to the fact that there were many non-White Purgations amongst the Sain and that a majority of the Dysfonctionnel were, in fact, racially White Purgation, and some more brazen PNL politicians at the time would often retort that it was, in fact, the civil rights activist detractors who displayed an 'obsession with racial statistics and relative racial compositions' who were 'most guilty' of 'stereotyping ethnic minorities' and 'painting non-White Purgations with a broad brush', with the Magnificus Dominus Chalon-Arlay de la Fayette even commenting in a public statement dated 9 September 1990 (during the early years of PNL rule) that he found it 'deeply offensive to suggest any connection whatsoever between being a racial and ethnic minority and being Dysfonctionnel', adding that that argument was 'downright slanderous and libellous to so many hard-working, diligent, conscientious non-White Purgations in this nation who do not deserve to be tarred and besmirched as criminals, as vandals, as work-shy vagrants or moochers, simply for the colour of their skin'.

While this rhetorical tactic was generally effective amongst most of the Purgation populace at the time, now, after more than three-decades of PNL rule over the Purgation State, this starkly disproportionate over-representation of the nation's most historically disadvantaged ethnic minorities who now make-up nearly half of the oppressed and enslaved Dysfonctionnel has not gone unnoticed by many members of those communities, and numerous ethnic minority Purgations increasingly harbour active hostility and incensed disdain against the ruling PNL government for its continued sanctification of the Sain-Dysfonctionnel genetic distinction and have begun to perceive its ongoing campaign of genocidal extermination against the so-called Dysfonctionnel as nothing more than an open war being waged by the State against their racial and ethnic communities, with many such ethnic minority Purgations - and especially lower-class and/or younger ethnic minority Purgations - being increasingly drawn towards anti-government ideologies and organisations as a result, such as the ongoing underground GEM resistance against the ruling PNL regime, resulting in a severe worsening of these pre-existing inter-racial fault lines and fissures which pre-dated PNL rule over the Purgation State but have been further exacerbated as a direct consequence of the policies of the present PNL regime. Only time will tell if the PNL Purgation State will be able to maintain control of the oppressed sub-class of the Dysfonctionnel, although if history is any indicator, it is only a matter of time before the anger and fury of this enslaved under-class becomes impossible to contain.

by **Purgatio** » Sun Sep 10, 2023 9:13 pm

Economic Structure and Social Stratification in the Purgation Social Order

The task of defining the social classes of any prevailing social order is fraught with immense difficulty, in large part due to the inherent subjectivities and divergences of viewpoint in determining what, precisely, constitutes a 'distinct' social class. The usual and simplest method, oft-employed by sociologists such as Beeghley, Gilbert, or Thompson & Hickey, is to divide the households of a nation based on household income with quantitatively arbitrary lines being drawn between the ending household income of one class and the starting household income of another, with as few or as many subdivisions as one prefers to include (e.g., upper-class, upper-middle-class, middle-middle-class, lower-middle-class, working-class, lower-class, under-class, etc.). Marxist intellectuals would, however, beg to differ, and would instead suggest that class is defined not by how much money one has or makes, but solely with reference to a person's relationship to the means of production (e.g., as slave-owner or slave, as landowning feudal aristocrat or landless peasant or serf, or as capital-owning capitalist or labour-selling worker, etc.).

Still others would argue that this, alone, is insufficient. Max Weber famously argued that socially stratified societies were divided based upon people's relative access or proximity to three basic sources of influence within a hierarchical social order - wealth (the amount of property and resources one has access to); prestige (the respect and esteem one commands in the eyes of general society); and, power (the ability to force, compel, or pressure others to bend to one's will irrespective of their personal opposition). Still others, such as Bourdieu, would argue that that is insufficient, and that a true analysis of class (as in Bourdieu's famous work La Distinction) must account for the cultural capital wielded by the upper-class, defined as the capacity one has to set the terms and conditions of the prevailing culture, to define what constitutes 'good taste', 'good manners', 'good education', 'good intellect', 'good speech', 'good behaviour', and socially appropriate or acceptable thoughts and conduct, with class being defined by one's access or proximity to the cultural capital of the prevailing socio-cultural order (e.g., with the upper-class having the cultural capital to set the terms of the culture, the middle-class having the limited cultural capital to mimic and internalise 'good taste' and 'good manners' to blend into polite, respectable company, and the lower-class having little to no cultural capital and, consequently, being locked out of social opportunities due to their 'tasteless' mannerisms or behaviours, with their aesthetic tastes and preferences being dominated by, and subordinated to, the alternative tastes and preferences of the upper-class, in defining what amounts to so-called 'good taste', due to the high cultural capital of the upper-class and the low cultural capital of the lower-class). Others, including Marxist intellectuals such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, would probably retort that the inequalities of social and cultural capital are merely a reflection or consequence of the inequalities of economic capital, ultimately arising out of relations of production, and the so-called 'cultural hegemony' or 'ideological state apparatuses' of the ruling class.

And others still, such as social critic Paul Fussell, anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, even famous authors such as Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edith Wharton, would perhaps argue that any analysis of class would have to be able to capture the crucial socio-cultural distinction between 'old money' and 'new money', and the distinct social milieu that people inhabit based not on how much money one may have, but, far more significantly, on how they earned their money, whether through work or inheritance, and more importantly, how long that money has remained within their family, and for how many generations, having implications on that household's social and cultural capital - namely, on their social circle, their network of connections, their socio-cultural 'prestige' in the eyes of the community, on their mannerisms, tastes, styles of dress, speech, and behaviour, their general attitude and outlook on life, and so on.

With all these myriad and competing understandings of the concept of 'class' within a stratified society, one similar undercurrent exists throughout them all - power. Competing definitions of 'class', be it 'social class', 'socio-economic class', 'economic class', classes of 'wealth' or 'income' or 'education', and so on, are simply varied attempts to capture relative and comparative gradations of power within a stratified, hierarchical, and unequal society, to define and delineate, in as clear and precise terms as one can manage, the different stratas of an inegalitarian society and their relative possession of, and proximity to, power as it is structured and distributed within that society. The important question, therefore, is what defines power within the Purgation State, specifically?

Within the present-day PNL-controlled Purgation State, the answer is simple - the continuing genocidal project for the extermination of the oppressed sub-class singled-out as the so-called Génétiquement Dysfonctionnel. That genocidal campaign is the fuel that is burnt to sustain the modern-day Purgation economy, it is the lifeblood of the ruling regime, the source of the PNL dictatorship's legitimacy of its claim to power (to protect the ordinary Sain from the genetic contamination and socially disordered tendencies of the Dysfonctionnel), and the origin of immense wealth generated for the nation's elite, through highly-profitable 'concession contracts' over more than 49,000 concentration camps and 'liquidation facilities', in which hundreds of millions of Dysfonctionnel forced labourers are being slowly worked to death via 'liquidation through labour', generating trillions of Élites annually for the nation's many private for-profit concessionaires, and accruing profits for numerous beneficiaries - government contractors, traders and business partners of concessionaires, creditors and lenders, corporate purchasers of cheap finished goods, sub-contractors and sub-lessees purchasing smaller sub-divided fractions of the forced labour of the detainees, investors who pour their financial capital into a variety of concession-derived financial products (known as des profits à prendre) linked or pegged to the profits of these 'concession contracts', scientific agencies and research partners who rely on the camps' unethical forced experimentation for their own research projects and to hone and further develop their intellectual properties, and so on. The Purgation State has therefore been described by many foreign sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists as a so-called 'rentier-genocidal economy', the 'liquidation through labour' genocidal extermination of the Dysfonctionnel is a source of economic capital, political capital, social capital, and cultural capital all rolled into one. One's access to, and control over, this ongoing project correspondingly grants one access to immense wealth (from the rentier profits and capital returns from the 'concession contracts' and a whole host of concession-linked financial products and services), political power (within the PNL one-party state), a portfolio of high-placed social connections (within the elite oligarchical clique which backs and supports the PNL regime in exchange for access to its closed yet highly profitable concession-linked marketplace), and immense socio-cultural prestige and legitimacy (as the Sain-Dysfonctionnel socio-legal distinction and the continuing persecution of the Dysfonctionnel has been a cardinal part of the socio-cultural life and internal national narrative of the modern PNL Purgation State).

Consequently, while a myriad of differing factors define's a household's capacity to benefit and profit from this 'rentier-genocidal economy', ultimately, the most important factor within the structure of a modern 'financial capitalist' economy such as that of the Purgation State is, of course, a household's possession of liquid investible financial capital. From a Marxist perspective, possessing high amounts of such financial capital defines a household's position within the relations of production - namely, as a capital investor reaping capital returns from the so-called 'rentier-genocidal economy', as opposed to being a mere labourer forced to earn labour income in competition with a cheap, readily exploitable forced labour workforce detained within the country's sprawling 'liquidation facilities'. One's relative capacity to profit from the 'rentier-genocidal economy' is dependent, necessarily, upon one's ownership of the necessary liquid financial capital to reap returns from the financial industry's des profits à prendre concession-linked derivatives and the numerous other financial products linked, directly or indirectly, to such des profits à prendre derivatives. From a Weberian perspective, financial investment within the structure of the 'rentier-genocidal economy' grants a family access to 'class, status, and party' all at once - the wealth created from the slave labour of the 'concession contracts', the prestige associated with being an 'old money' upper-class family with closer socio-cultural proximity to the elite milieu of Les Enfants du Ciel aristocratic families, and the raw political power that stems from one's proximity to the PNL-linked oligarchical clique that is central and crucial to keeping the present regime in power, and in turn, relies upon that same regime to exert brute political force upon detractors and opponents of the ruling haut bourgeois elite class. And from a Bourdieuan point of view, the ruling class's possession of the necessary investible financial capital to reap supranormal profits from the 'rentier-genocidal economy' grants that class both the cultural capital (i.e., 'prestige'), and the attendant personal incentive, to construct, create, and preserve a socio-cultural milieu dominated by mores, norms, and customs which reinforce and justify the Purgation State's 'rentier-genocidal economy' based on its Sain-Dysfonctionnel distinction, the socially Darwinistic and genetically discriminatory ideals of the Mandatum Est philosophical belief system, and the heavy and intense cultural stigmatisation of various traits deemed to be both innate as well as 'parasitical', 'disordered', 'dysfunctional', and thereby injurious and prejudicial to the well-being of the national community (i.e., criminality, vagrancy, work-shy tendencies, mooching, leeching, incontinence, etc.), which are hallmarks of modern cultural conservatism and socially conservative ideals within the PNL-controlled Purgation State.

Accordingly, the class-based approach to subdividing the Purgation populace into various 'classes' follows the approach of using liquid investible financial capital as the primary indicator of a household's possession of, or proximity to, power as defined and understood within the modern-day 'rentier-genocidal economy' of the Purgation State. The upper-class, in this framework, is understood as the class with an abundance of liquid investible financial capital to such an extent that they can be said to occupy the socio-economic position of capital investor within the 'rentier-genocidal economy' of the Purgation State (sometimes referred to by Marxist writers as a so-called 'aristocracy of finance'). The lower-class, in contrast, is understood as the class with little to no liquid investible financial capital, to such an extent that they cannot feasibly or practically benefit from the capital returns generated by this 'rentier-genocidal economy' of the Purgation State, and thereby firmly occupy the socio-economic position of worker and wage-labourer alone within that prevailing economic structure, thereby being dependent upon, and vulnerable to, the comparative power of the ruling class which fully controls their labour and their economic future. Within these two traditional social classes - an upper-class with dominant power in a stratified society versus a lower-class that is largely socially powerless and thereby fully dominated and controlled by that upper-class - there is a liminal and interstitial category which sociologists and anthropologists often refer to as the so-called 'middle-class', the class that occupies an intermediate social position by virtue of their possession of some power within the community, in excess of the total complete powerlessness and vulnerability of the lower-class, but not reaching the controlling extent of the ruling dominant social position enjoyed by the upper-class. The very concept of a so-called 'middle-class' has always been immensely controversial and contentious within academic circles and amongst the intelligentsia, with many even contesting the existence of such a class in a modern-day 'financial capitalist' economy. Within the 'rentier-genocidal economy' of the Purgation State, however, it is arguably possible to carve out and delineate such an intermediate position - namely, it is those households with some substantial quantity of liquid investible financial capital, such that they can partially benefit from the capital returns of that 'rentier-genocidal economy', but not fully benefit therefrom to such an extent that they solely occupy the position of capital investor within the Purgation economy. Consequently, this 'middle-class' is both investor and wage-labourer at the same time, with substantial proportions of their income stemming, in part, from the capital returns of des profits à prendre and other concession-linked derivatives and financial products, and in part, from the expending of their own individual wage labour. Finally, at the bottom, there is the so-called under-class, the class that is not merely powerless, but are demonised, oppressed, and persecuted to an extent not inflicted upon the powerless and dependent lower-class of that society. These are, obviously, the enslaved Dysfonctionnel presently undergoing a slow and gradual exterminatory process of 'liquidation through labour', the persecuted fuel that is being burnt to power and maintain the existing 'rentier-genocidal economy' of the Purgation State.

With this definition in mind, it has been estimated that the Purgation State's stratified social structure may be summarised as such - an upper-class at the top (composed of roughly 1-2% of all Purgation households), followed by a middle-class (comprising around 19-24% of all Purgation households), with a large lower-class below them (consisting of approximately 59-65% of all Purgation households), and at the very bottom, an under-class of enslaved Dysfonctionnel (who collectively make up an estimated 14-16% of the entire Purgation population).

It should be noted here that class is a social reality, defined by one's objective position occupied within the prevailing social structure, and is decidedly not determined by mere self-identification, since personal identity can often conflict with the objective social position one occupies within the existing community. As such, the class labels self-applied and discretionarily utilised by individual Purgations will often conflict with the classes as delineated above, based on an objective analysis of a Purgation household's relationship to the prevailing 'rentier-genocidal economy' and the corresponding social structure erected in the Purgation State. For example, many Purgations do not use the term lower-class but prefer the term 'working-class' to define their circumstances - a comforting euphemism, no doubt, but a deeply misleading and outright false one, at that, since it implies that anyone who works at all would fall within that class, which is not how the term is actually used and employed in practice (namely, as a substitute for the sociological category of the 'lower-class', the class with little to no power of control over the prevailing stratified social structure). Moreover, many Purgations define themselves as falling within the so-called 'middle-class' based solely on their self-perception of their family circumstances as 'comfortable' or 'average' in some vague and ill-defined sense. Consequently, most national surveys on class have generally found that very few Purgations (less than 1%) will actually self-identify as being part of the upper-class, with the rest of the population being roughly evenly split between those who self-identify as part of the middle-class (~46-49%) and as part of the so-called 'working-class' (~50-53%) respectively, whatever those terms mean to those respondents. Needless to say, any class analysis with real explanatory value should prioritise objective social reality over arbitrary personal identification, and that is the basis on which the explanations and analysis below shall be conducted.

by **Purgatio** » Tue Sep 12, 2023 1:05 am

Upper-Class (~1-2% of all Purgation households)

The Purgation upper-class is herein defined as the dominant ruling class of the society that controls economic and political power in the Purgation State by virtue of their ruling position within the 'rentier-genocidal economy', as the capital investors with access to an abundance of liquid investible financial capital to pour and expend into the slavery-linked, concession-derived, highly-profitable Purgation financial market. Estimates as to the size of this class differ; however, it is generally estimated that, in a Purgation capital market with average returns of around 5-7% per annum (net returns, minus all the usual administrative costs and managerial fees charged by wealth managers and private investors), a household would need access to 'liquid investible financial capital' (defined by the financial industry, private banking, and wealth management sectors as wealth that can be easily liquidated and re-invested into other financial assets to generate a profit from capital returns, thus assets such as primary residential homes or family vehicles that are in use would generally be excluded) of at least US$2-3 million (or $2.718-4.077 million Élites) to be able to generate large enough capital returns that are sufficient for a household to live off of the annual capital income accrued from its household financial investments alone. Only in such a scenario can that household then be said to occupy the economic position of an investor or capital owner (as part of the so-called 'financial aristocracy' or 'aristocracy of finance' as understood in the Marxist sense of that phrase) within the present economic structure of the Purgation 'rentier-genocidal economy'.

As for how many households, precisely, would fall within that elite strata, estimates vary by virtue of the simple fact that the total assets owned by any individual household (and the market value thereof) are generally not publicly available information. The best estimates come from various wealth management companies and providers of private banking services, since the minimum wealth requirements generally imposed for customers to be eligible for 'private banking' services tend to fall within the range required for a household to generate large and substantial returns from its investments (so as to constitute a decent, stable, and self-sufficient income in its own right). La Banque Royale d'Auxiliora (LBRA) requires customers to maintain investments of a minimum of $2.9 million Élites (approximately US$2.134 million) to be eligible for its private banking services, and its 2023 report estimated that around 21.1 million households possessed the liquid (and net) financial assets required to qualify for its private banking programme (if they made the choice to shift all their financial investments to LBRA-linked accounts and portfolios), amounting to around 2.1% of all Purgation households. Le Crédit Industriel de la Société Commerciale de la Couronne (CISCC) requires customers to maintain investments of a minimum of $4.4 million Élites (approximately US$3.238 million) to qualify for its private banking services, and has estimated in its 2023 national wealth report that only around 8.3 million households had the liquid financial assets to be eligible for that programme, amounting to just 0.82% of all Purgation households.

Accordingly, depending on the precise definition and the quantitative threshold one uses to define a household with access to 'sufficient' liquid investible financial capital to generate a self-sufficient and self-sustaining capital income (i.e., without the need for any additional labour income), the upper-class of the Purgation State is composed of roughly 1-3% of all free Purgation households engaged in the commercial marketplace (i.e., not including the enslaved Dysfonctionnel), and thereby amounting to approximately 1-2% of all Purgation households (including the Dysfonctionnel).

The one main commonality between all upper-class households, so defined, is their relationship to the means of production and their relative position within the 'rentier-genocidal economy' of the Purgation State, namely, as capital investors reaping supranormal capital returns and a healthy and substantial income from the Purgation financial marketplace, based off of the brutal enslavement and exploitation of the Dysfonctionnel forced labourers toiling away in the country's brutish and miserable des facilités de liquidation. Consequently, they are the economic beneficiaries of the present socio-economic structure in the PNL-ruled Purgation State, and have a powerful vested economic incentive to work to maintain and preserve the prevailing social order, whilst simultaneously having the economic capital, proximity to political power, and social clout and influence to practically achieve that aim in the established Purgation society. Of course, the quantitative wealth and abundance enjoyed by such upper-class families varies wildly based on the size of their family fortunes. An upper class family just on the cusp of this strata may have US$2-3 million in net liquid and investible financial assets, generating a healthy annual capital income (i.e., around US$100-200,000 a year) for the family to enjoy a comfortable existence and to supplement whatever labour income the family members may accrue throughout the year, but certainly not enough to live the stereotypical life of lavish luxury and wasteful abundance of a mogul, oligarch, or tycoon. In contrast, occupying the very top rung of the upper-class, several thousand Purgation billionaires have reaped the opulent and extravagant benefits of the present socio-economic order, raking in millions per annum in an enormous capital income, scooping up the lion's share of the country's rentier profits and being more than capable of funding a truly profligate lifestyle through their capital ownership alone. Irrespective of the precise size and quantity of the capital income generated, however, all upper-class families are united by a common economic interest, all upper-class families have sufficient financial capital to live off of the capital returns by themselves, without the need for any additional labour income, making them the primary economic beneficiaries of the present system.

This is not to say, however, that upper-class families do not work or engage in paid employment or remunerated labour. Most adults within upper-class families, in fact, are engaged in some form of paid work; however, the key point is that they do not need to do so. Such families are not driven by necessity or desperation into the labour workforce, they are free to enter and exit paid employment as and when they please, and leaving the workforce for an extended period of time is always a viable alternative for the members of such families because the capital income generated from their household's financial assets and investments is enough to sustain a comfortable and affluent existence, all by themselves. Consequently, upper-class families are not in the same economic position as that of the vulnerability and dependence of middle-class or lower-class families, who must sell their labour in order to survive, sustain themselves, and afford the basic necessities of life. Their presence within the paid labour workforce is entirely voluntary and elective, not driven by any external economic pressures or financial exigency, occupying a dominant position within the prevailing relations of production in the Purgation economy. Consequently, upper-class labour is often of a more honourable and prestigious variety. Upper-class adults take jobs for the purposes of accruing social and cultural capital, not economic capital. The purpose of employment for an upper-class denizen is not survival, but the projection of power.

At this point, a crucial distinction must be drawn between two segments of the upper-class, which is a defining fault line within Purgation 'high society' and elite circles in general - that is, the all-important difference between 'old money' families and 'new money' families. The definition of an 'old money' or 'new money' family is, necessarily, difficult to delineate with precision, given the inherent arbitrariness and subjectivity is ascertaining 'how long' a family's fortune must have persisted before it is deemed sufficiently 'old' in the eyes of Purgation 'high society' - much will depend on the individual perception of different elite families within the Purgation haut monde. However, most sociologists agree that a family's wealth must have existed for, at a minimum, at least three generations before it can be considered 'old money', since that is the arbitrary cut-off point when all living generations of a household can be said to have enjoyed an upper-class life of ease, leisure, and abundance (although, of course, many more ancient and venerable 'old money' families would naturally have internalised a much higher bar or threshold for determining whether they consider a family to be an 'old money' or a 'new money' family). Based on this definition, most of the upper-class families in Purgatio would be 'new money' and not 'old money' households. It is estimated that, amongst High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) in Purgatio, only around 20% inherited their fortunes, and amongst billionaires in Purgatio, that percentage drops further to an estimated 11-14%. This is not to say that other millionaires or billionaires are so-called 'self-made' individuals who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and elevated themselves into wealth and abundance from a deprived lower-class background - although an exceedingly small number of genuine 'rags to riches' wealthy Purgations do exist, they overwhelmingly derive from the entertainment industries, such as actors, actresses, singers, rappers, pop stars, models, professional athletes, social media influencers, high-class escorts, prostitutes, strippers, and so on - most so-called 'self-made' millionaires and billionaires who 'strike gold' from a recent business venture or successful commercial enterprise generally hail from relatively more affluent backgrounds, who managed to build their fortunes to be larger than that of their parents', but with at least some financial assistance from their family, be it in the form of a direct loan or start-up capital, or more often than not, in more indirect forms such as paying their way through college or a critical internship or supporting them with a personal allowance in the first few years of their start-up venture. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the insular and elitist Purgation haut monde, a person who only recently made or built their fortune through a recent successful business venture (even if they hailed from a somewhat affluent or comfortable family background) would be considered nouveau riche and therefore a vulgarian arriviste or a mere parvenu upstart, a recent entrant into the Purgation upper-class who is not 'truly upper-class' because they did not have an upper-class upbringing or background and therefore cannot be expected to have internalised the 'good taste' and 'refined mannerisms' of the upper-class elite milieu of the Purgation le bon-ton in order to properly inhabit the rarefied le beau monde that is Purgation 'high society'.

Of course, it should be acknowledged that whether a family is 'old money' or 'new money' has no implications on the economic capital that family wields and, by extension, the dominant and privileged position that household will occupy in the prevailing relations of production of the Purgation 'rentier-genocidal economy', which operates on a hierarchical relationship between the ruling capital investors, the wage-labourers who must sell their labour to survive, and the exploited and enslaved forced labourers at the bottom who are reduced to mere exploitable assets for capital investors to reap their capital returns therefrom. Nevertheless, there is a socio-cultural aspect to the 'old money'-'new money' distinction which has implications on the relative mannerisms and behavioural characteristics of households within the respective categories. So-called 'new money' households generally earned their fortunes through a relatively recent successful business venture; consequently, the 'paid labour' that such households' members would often be engaged in usually takes the form of leadership or managerial positions within the company or companies that constitute the source of the nouveau riche family's recent fortune, be it claiming directors' fees on the board of directors or occupying an active high-ranking executive officer position (i.e., as President, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director, Chief Operating Officer, etc.). In contrast, so-called 'old money' households generally made their fortunes several generations prior, few of them will have any subsisting 'active business' or 'profitable going concern' generating money for the family, more often than not the family's assets will have been liquidated decades ago and now takes the form of family office investment portfolios generating passive capital income from a diversified range of investments. Consequently, the 'paid labour' that such households' members will be engaged in typically takes the form of some slight and honorary work of a largely ceremonial character, intended to project honour, esteem, and prestige. This can include serving on the board of governors of the nation's top elite universities and prestigious private schools, serving on the board of trustees of major charities and philanthropic organisations, or serving in a leadership role in the nation's top artistic or cultural institutions, such as L'Institut National du Patrimoine, Le Conseil Royal du Patrimoine, or L'Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, thereby becoming the guardians and safekeepers of the nation's heritage, history, refined arts, and her so-called 'high culture' more broadly.

There is, naturally, a great deal of social friction and cultural clashes between 'old money' and 'new money' families. Ultimately, however, a delicate balancing act ends up being performed between these two factions of the Purgation upper-class, with the 'old money' households having to accommodate or at least barely tolerate the existence of 'new money' families within this elite socio-economic strata of Purgation 'high society' for the simple pragmatic reason that many nouveau riche families are often extremely wealthy, having made their fortunes and 'struck gold' through recent successful commercial ventures (as opposed to merely generating more modest passive income over the course of decades without an active commercial enterprise or profitable going concern), and are therefore able to exert immense influence over various spheres of contemporary Purgation society which the established wealthy families cannot afford to spurn or ignore. On the other hand, 'new money' or nouveau riche families will often attempt to assimilate within the pre-existing socio-cultural framework of the established Purgation upper-class, by carefully navigating the unwritten socio-cultural rules and subtle codes of conduct of Purgation 'high society' to better assimilate into that elite environment, by attempting to mimic and adopt the decorum, mannerisms, tastes, styles, and defining behavioural traits and habits of the more established 'old money' families, in order to curry favour with, and ultimately be accepted by, that established Purgation elite, in order to obtain the prestige, honour, and social acceptance which a nouveau riche family of recently wealthy arrivistes would generally lack. The most common example of such inter-familial compromises takes the form of inter-marriages between 'old money' and 'new money' families, with the 'new money' family offering access to its abundant economic capital and more contemporary influence within modern Purgation society, and the 'old money' family offering its social and cultural capital, the prestige and esteem of an older and more venerable aristocratic title, a wealth of high-placed social connections within the Purgation elite milieu of le bon-ton, and the so-called 'good tastes' and 'good mannerisms' that enable a family of vulgarian parvenus to more seamlessly integrate into the prevailing socio-cultural framework of the elite Purgation haut monde.

Consequently, the contemporary Purgation upper-class is defined by an intricate network of strategic inter-marriages connecting numerous wealthy families to one another, with the result that a Purgation family within the upper-class will often be able to draw on a wealth of influential connections within different branches of its family tree, connecting the members of that family to, for example, high-ranking PNL politicians wielding raw political power, wealthy business tycoons and oligarchs, influential high-ranking leaders within the Purgation artistic, cultural, academic, scientific, media, social, charities, or philanthropic sectors, and prestigious aristocrats, each attained from different strategic inter-marriages. There is a strong cultural expectation, therefore, amongst upper-class families that children owe a duty and obligation to comply with the marital deals and bargains negotiated by their parents, and that submitting to, and complying with, the marriages arranged by one's family is a basic aspect of filial piety and one's duty of loyalty and fidelity to one's family. Most of the oldest aristocratic families in the country, with titles dating back to the 1500s or 1600s (or even earlier), have long since ceased to wield the economic power and socio-cultural influence that they once did, and the remaining elite network of aristocratic families (only 637 of them on the Les Enfants du Ciel Registry) that remain a dominant and influential force in Purgation society have only managed to retain their relevance by brokering strategic inter-marriages, not based on love, affection, or spousal choice, but strictly based on the strategic value that the intended fiancé(e) will bring to the family in question. Old aristocratic families which either did not, or could not, arrange such strategically arranged inter-marriages (be it due to the obstinance and rebelliousness of their offspring, a parental unwillingness to trespass upon the choices or marital freedoms of their children, an inability to network strategically within 'high society' circles to procure such strategic marriages, or simply a lack of foresight and wherewithal to plan for such marriages to secure the long-term future of one's family due to ignorance, apathy, short-sightedness, or a combination of all three) have long since faded into social irrelevance and economic redundancy within a modern industrialised, financialised, capitalistic Purgation society which no longer operates on a feudal and agrarian economic model, leaving only those aristocratic families which did successfully arrange such marriages and have since incalculated a long-standing cultural and familial expectation for their children to submit, obey, and comply with the strategic inter-marriages negotiated and arranged by their parents, which are framed as a cardinal and paramount duty owed by that child to do what is necessary to secure the long-term fortunes, clout, and influence of their family, thereby securing their place and position within the Purgation ruling class.

In terms of the connection between the Purgation upper-class and the hierarchy of racial-genetic castes within Purgation society, all members of the Purgation upper-class will fall into one of three social categories. At the very top of the hierarchy are the tiny elite milieu of 637 old, wealthy aristocratic families with immense prestige, clout, and influence, by virtue of centuries of strategic arranged inter-marriages connecting the descendants of that family's old, venerable, prestigious aristocratic forebears to contemporary influential players within modern Purgation society, with high-ranking power and high-placed influence within politics, governance, law, media, academia, scientific and research institutes, the armed forces, social, artistic, and cultural institutions, amongst others, forming a powerful and dominant 'elite within an elite' that is the de facto leadership of the Purgation upper-class. Just below them are the Génétiquement Mélangé families who are partially descended from an elite Les Enfants du Ciel family and partially descended from another family within the Purgation upper-class which has not attained the elite prestigious status of being entered into the PIGC's highly exclusive Les Enfants du Ciel Registry. Such families will often be accorded a measure of reflected glory, honour, and prestige of that accorded to the Les Enfants du Ciel family they are partially related to, although the extent of that esteem and respect will vary depending on the relative prestige and power of the Les Enfants du Ciel family they are related to and, perhaps more importantly, that of the ordinary Sain upper-class family they are related to as well. Finally, the overwhelming majority of the Purgation 'upper-class' are of an ordinary Génétiquement Sain racial-genetic classification. Such families make-up the social bedrock and foundation of this elite caste, and their longevity and long-term belonging within the Purgation upper-class will often depend, in large part, upon the strategic decisions that are made, and the extent of the social networking conducted, by the family in question. A nouveau riche family that 'strikes gold' with a very recent business venture, and makes no effort to integrate or assimilate into Purgation 'high society', form critical social connections with other high-placed Purgation families, arranges no strategic inter-marriages between their children and the children of other upper-class families to bring in other high-placed influential connections into their household, and generally remains on the outskirts or fringes of the Purgation haut monde, is unlikely to remain 'upper-class' for much longer. Most likely, their economic fortunes will end up being frittered away within just two or three generations or less, whether by profligate short-sighted descendants wasting away the fortune, the usual vicissitudes of the commercial marketplace and from failed business ventures or investments, or other more influential and well-connected members of the Purgation upper-class wielding those connections to use and abuse the machineries and organs of the all-powerful PNL regime to destroy and tear down the fortunes of a recent nouveau riche family that made no strategic efforts to cultivate the necessary social connections or garner the crucial prestige, honour, and esteem in the eyes of other well-placed Purgation families that could have protected and shielded them from the calculated destruction of their jealous competitors. In contrast, on the other end of the spectrum of prestige and respectability, an upper-class Sain family which thinks on a strategic level, sends their children to the elite schools dominated by the Les Enfants du Ciel children and their Mélangé relatives and cousins, cultivates the right connections by networking furiously and successfully at 'high society' events, properly curates the behaviours and associations of their children to avoid ruinous scandals and build up an esteemed and honourable reputation, and of course, arranges all of the necessary and proper strategic inter-marriages between their children and the children of other high-placed and influential families within the Purgation upper-class to garner evermore economic, social, and cultural capital for their family, stands a very good chance of forming and founding a new Mélangé branch of an established Les Enfants du Ciel family and, eventually, seeing their descendants enter the elite prestigious strata of the Les Enfants du Ciel racial-genetic caste, in future, thereby cementing their place and position within the Purgation upper-class in the long-run.

It all comes down, at the end of the day, to the ability and willingness of a Purgation upper-class family to play that game of power and influence and to make all of the necessary sacrifices (including and especially the sacrifice of the marital freedom of their children to freely choose their own desired spouses) to fully entrench their belonging within this highly-exclusionary and extremely and furiously competitive elite strata of Purgation society, which truly distinguishes the Purgation upper-class family that establishes themselves as a permanent, long-term player within the Purgation upper-class for multiple generations to come, from those Purgation upper-class families (or the 'so-called upper-class', as the more prestigious 'old money' families would refer to them) that are merely short-term 'fly by night' entrants whose fortunes appear only as a mere fluke or uncharacteristic blip in history without any longevity to it, here one day and then gone the next, possessing only a vulnerably temporary and fleeting wealth of a merely short-term, ephemeral, wholly transient character, without any long-term social influence or lasting cultural prestige to their family name, thereby never truly belonging within the socio-cultural milieu of the Purgation upper-class.

by **Purgatio** » Sat Sep 16, 2023 9:28 pm

Middle-Class (~19-24% of all Purgation households)

Below the Purgation upper-class lies the so-called 'middle-class', referring to the class that occupies an intermediate and interstitial socio-economic position between the powerlessness and dependence of the 'lower-class' and the dominant ruling position of the 'upper-class'. Within a financial capitalist Purgation economy with its prevailing relations of production between capital investor and wage-labourer, and which is further defined by the hierarchical socio-economic structure of a 'rentier-genocidal economy', that interstitial social position necessarily refers to those households which occupy a mixed or middle-ground social position between the ruling capital investors, on the one hand, holding a dominant economic position within the prevailing relations of production, and the dependent wage-labourers, on the other, lacking the necessary financial capital to be in a position to profit from the 'rentier-genocidal economy' and the rentier capital returns thereof, and thereby forced, by the necessity of their circumstances, into the dependent position of having to sell their labour to the capital-owning upper-class to reap a wage-based income based on the necessary sale and expending of their labour to satisfy their basic needs and to meet their day-to-day expenses. In other words, that interstitial or intermediate social position, within the prevailing relations of production, would have to be occupied by those Purgation households which are both capital investor and dependent wage-labourer all at once and at the same time - enter, the so-called Purgation 'middle-class' of 'mass affluent' households.

The threshold for the 'mass affluent' or 'middle-class' category differs wildly based on where one draws that arbitrary and highly-subjective line. Within the financial industry, banking institutions will often offer specialised banking services, such as higher interest rates, personalised investment advice, and the services of relationship managers, to customers who qualify as so-called sub-High Net Worth Individuals or sub-HNWIs, who do not qualify for the one-to-one advice and relationship of their 'private banking' services (which are usually reserved for clients that are HNWIs or above). For example, La Banque Purgatienne de Valentinois (LBPV) offers specialised banking services under its De Valentinois: La Première Classe programme to all customers with a minimum net value of 'assets under management' (AUM) of at least $150,000 Élites or more (approximately US$110,375), and its 2023 report examining the bank's 'customer profile' estimated that as many as around 240.17 million households in Purgatio (around 24-25% of all Purgation households) had the net financial assets to meet its minimum AUM qualifying criterion (if they shifted all their liquid financial assets into LBPV-linked accounts, trusts, and portfolios). On the higher end of the spectrum, Le Crédit Commercial de Montfauçon (CCM) offers specialised banking services under its Les Privilèges de Montfauçon programme only to customers with a minimum net value of their AUM of $290,000 Élites or more (approximately US$213,392), and its 2023 report estimated that around 179.34 million households in Purgatio (around 18-19% of all Purgation households) possessed the net worth required to theoretically satisfy CCM's minimum AUM requirement. The 'mass affluent' class is therefore a very important market and client base for the Purgation financial industry to tap into, for whilst each individual sub-HNWI household may lack the abundant financial capital of the wealthier upper-class households or HNWI private banking clients, nonetheless, by virtue of their sheer numbers and substantial assets between them, they still collectively control over hundreds of trillions of Élites in wealth capable of being invested on the Purgation financial market to reap a healthy and not insubstantial capital return.

The fortunes and lifestyles of the 'mass affluent' middle-class varies widely from household to household; indeed, the very existence of the taxonomical classification of 'middle-class' is a highly controversial one. A strong argument may be made, in fact, that no true 'middle class' exists, that Purgation society is divided only into the ruling capital-owning investor class (which earns enough capital income to sustain themselves such that they do not need to work), the 'working-class' or 'lower-class' (consisting of any family which has to sell their labour to survive simply by virtue of their absence of substantial capital income to sustain their basic needs) which the so-called 'middle-class' would fall into, and an 'under-class' at the very bottom consisting of an enslaved Dysfonctionnel sub-group that is oppressed and persecuted to squeeze out a supranormal profit for the ruling 'capital-owning investor' class. Proponents of this view would point out that, persons who are only on the cusp of the so-called 'mass affluent' middle-class (based on the financial industry's definition) would only yield annual capital returns of around just US$7,500-13,000 per annum, hardly a decent income for a household to survive on. Consequently, while the 'mass affluent' class might be in a comparatively better and more fortunate economic position than the working-class (or 'lower-class') families who have little to no liquid investible financial assets of their own, they are, at the end of the day, 'working-class' all the same, by virtue of their position within the relations of production - i.e., as persons forced by circumstances to sell their labour to survive, because they lack access to substantial capital income to sustain themselves and to meet their needs without having to work.

There is strong persuasive force to that view. Indeed, the fact that the 'mass affluent' middle-class lacks access to a self-sustaining capital income puts them in the same position of economic vulnerability and dependance as the rest of the 'working-class', namely, being in a position where they have no choice but to sell their labour and work to survive and meet their needs. However, focussing only on that point of similarity obscures a crucial characteristic of the 'mass affluent' middle-class which arguably justifies its existence as a separate taxonomical category, namely, that it's position within the 'rentier-genocidal economy' of the Purgation State is not fully interchangeable either with that of the rentiers in the Purgation upper-class or that of the fully capital-bereft lower-class. The 'mass affluent' middle-class is truly interstitial in terms of the position it occupies within that financial capitalist economic model, because of its unique position as part capital investor and part wage-labourer. It is distinct from the Purgation upper-class in that the 'mass affluent' middle-class lacks access to substantial capital returns of such quantity that they can live off of the rentier profits alone, and thus must sell their labour to survive. At the same time, they are also distinct from the Purgation lower-class because they do possess a substantial quantity of investible financial capital to earn capital returns therefrom, and therefore are in a position to benefit from the exploitable returns off of the profits extracted from the slave labour of the Dysfonctionnel through the country's many 'concession contracts' and derivative concession-linked des profits à prendre financial products. Indeed, a household with access to investible financial assets of around US$500,000, for example, would be in a position to earn a steady capital income of around US$25,000-35,000 per annum, depending upon the prevailing market conditions in the Purgation financial market, not enough by itself to sustain a comfortable life for that family, but a sizeable enough sum that that household can justifiably be said to be profiting from the ‘rentier-genocidal economy’ of the Purgation State, such that it would be quite misleading to classify that household’s position within the prevailing relations of production as just that of wage-labourers alone.

Consequently, while their economic interests are not fully aligned with the Purgation upper-class, they are not fully aligned with that of the Purgation lower-class either. If the system of 'concession contracts' were to be ended, and the Dysfonctionnel no longer available to be exploited and enslaved to squeeze out a healthy capital income or rentier profit therefrom, the capital returns reaped on the Purgation financial market would decline substantially. This, of course, would severely affect the rentier profits that stand to be enjoyed by the Purgation upper-class; however, it also affects, to a lesser degree, the 'mass affluent' middle-class, which possesses investible financial capital (i.e., excluding any non-investible assets such as one's automobile or primary residential home) of at least US$100,000 or more, investible into unit trusts, actively managed investment portfolios, indexed-linked funds of stocks and bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, retirement accounts, and more, such that any decline in the annual capital returns generated on capital investments within the Purgation financial industry would also hurt the annual income earned by the 'mass affluent' middle-class, in a way that simply is not true for the rest of the so-called 'working-class' without any substantial investible financial assets to begin with. For that reason, the so-called 'mass affluent' middle-class justifies its own separate category to properly capture that distinct economic interest of that class, which, based on estimates from the financial and wealth management industry, consists of around 22-28% of all free Purgation households engaged in the commercial marketplace (i.e., not including the enslaved Dysfunctionnel), and thereby amounting to approximately 19-24% of all Purgation households (inclusive of the Dysfonctionnel).

There is another compelling reason for examining the 'mass affluent' middle-class as a separate social class in its own right, that is, in fully explaining the rise to power of PNL fascism in the Purgation State. It is no exaggeration to state that the Purgation middle-class is, in large part, responsible for bringing the PNL to power, and keeping the ruling PNL regime in power. The middle-class is the class most beset by a unique combination of a sense of elitism and superiority over the 'lower-classes', on the one hand, and a terrified class-based anxiety of 'slipping' in their present class status to the lower-class, whether from economic instability or the redistributive or revolutionary violence of the lower-class. This combination of class-based interests drew the middle-class to reactionary politics due to the unique socio-economic and socio-political circumstances of the Purgation State in the 1980s - the economic malaise of the Great Recession heightened the middle-class's anxieties about 'downward drift' in its class status from unemployment, inflation, and economic instability; the growing radicalism of the working-class and the rise in far-left socialistic and communistic movements like the CPP and L'Épée du Peuple accentuated the fears and general panic of the middle-class about the prospect of the revolutionary violence of the lower-classes stripping the middle-class of the comparative comfort and privilege they enjoy over their 'social inferiors'; the reactionary rhetoric and promised 'Law and Order' policies of the PNL appealed to middle-class elitism and anxieties through an implied promise of a return to a 'better time' when the working-class would be kept 'under control' and properly policed to protect the rest of society from violent crime, juvenile delinquency, welfare dependency, drug and gang-related crime, mass illegal immigration, and other such social problems which the middle-class tends to stereotypically associate with their 'socio-economic inferiors'; and, finally, the fascistic rhetoric of a promised national re-birth, the reincarnation of the nation's destiny, and general 'palingenetic ultranationalism', appealed to middle-class fears of national decline and a feared degeneration of the nation's productivity and vitality at the hands of the so-called 'degenerative' and 'disordered' elements of the national community. The subsequent policies of the PNL regime, in suppressing left-wing radicalism, throwing communist leaders in concentration camps, forcefully destroying independent labour unions, keeping income taxation low and capital taxation non-existent, deregulating businesses (which especially appealed to petit bourgeois small business owners in particular), and opening up new opportunities for profitable financial investments through 'concession contracts' over the slave labour of the Dysfonctionnel and their 'liquidation facilities', appealed to the economic class interests of the middle-class and helped to secure the long-term support of that class. As the ruling upper-class (given their sheer numbers and small size) would never be able to seize and hold onto power over the Purgation State all on their own, in the face of the concerted and general organised opposition of the rest of the overwhelming majority of Purgation society, it is no exaggeration to state that the broad support of the middle-class for PNL fascism has been crucial and indispensable in enabling the PNL party to both launch its successful coup d'état of 1987-1988 and to then maintain its hold onto power in the subsequent decades.

The 'mass affluent' middle-class has, broadly, enjoyed a comfortable economic existence under the PNL one-party state. Members of this class tend to have high incomes falling within the top quintile of the Purgation population, with annual household incomes of at least US$70,000 or more, with a healthy disposable income to save and invest into the profitable Purgation financial market and thereby build not insubstantial wealth over time to remain in the 'mass affluent' class of part-investors. Members of this class overwhelming hold university degrees and their children can generally expect to go to university as well. Members of this class tend to live in exclusionary 'gated communities', gatekept and guarded by high housing prices, restrictive covenants, neighbourhood watchmen, and homeowners' associations, all with the aim of 'keeping out' the lower-classes from entering and 'disturbing' the middle-class tranquility and comfort of their 'own' communities. Members of this class tend to fall either within the traditional petite bourgeoisie (e.g., as small business owners, self-employed professionals plying their craft on the open market, independent farmers working on and cultivating their own sizeable farmland estates in the countryside, independent contractors and freelancers in the media sector or the artistic and creative industries, etc.), hold stable employment as white-collar professionals (such as lawyers, notaries public, doctors, accountants, engineers, architects, etc.), dominate the middle-to-upper management and senior executive and managerial positions of the private sector, hold prominent positions in academia (as intellectuals and professors) or the scientific field (as researchers and managers of research laboratory units developing intellectual properties for private companies and universities), or hold high-ranking, prominent, and influential positions within the Professional Civil Service or the Purgation judiciary. Members of this class are more likely to be homeowners than renters, and can usually expect to receive a healthy but not extravagant inheritance from their parents or aunts and uncles, including a primary residential home and a small amount of liquid financial assets in the hundreds of thousands (but not millions) of Élites. By and large, the Purgation middle-class is a class of aspirational social climbers who seek (or hope) to one day break into the Purgation upper-class, whether by stroke of luck or by their own grit, talents, and abilities. They generally view the Purgation upper-class as an aspirational model to be admired and emulated, while disdaining the Purgation lower-class as a menacing force to be feared and treated with suspicion, due to the terrifying prospect of class envy, violent crime, rioting, and revolutionary violence seizing away the present comforts and privileges of the middle-class, thereby adopting the 'class markers' of the upper-class (from speech, to dress, to taste, to general social attitudes) so as to draw a clear social divide and distinction between themselves and their lower-class 'inferiors'. And while both the Purgation upper-class and middle-class often hold exclusionary, discriminatory, and elitist social attitudes, by and large, the elitism of the middle-class tends to be much more overtly hateful and outwardly and unabashedly hostile to the lower-class, due to that unique combination of class insecurities (and anxieties about a potential 'downward drift' in one's class status) mixed in with typical middle-class elitism, snobbery, and general sense of superiority.

The support of the middle-class for the PNL regime, however, is a double-edged sword, for what the middle-class giveth it can also taketh away. The economic anxieties of the middle-class have only been heightened and accentuated under decades of PNL one-party rule, from a combination of stagnating economic growth and the growing decline in social mobility and opportunities for social and economic advancement. The increasing elitism and the exclusionary attitudes of the Purgation upper-class - and especially the supremacist attitudes of the Les Enfants du Ciel aristocratic caste, many of whom view themselves as an innately separate and biologically superior class unto themselves - have increasingly begun to grate at the nerves of the economically anxious middle-class, some of whom have begun to grow more and more frustrated over the perceived hoarding of power and social opportunities of the PNL oligarchical elite and the Les Enfants du Ciel caste (and their upper-class 'inner circle' of supporters immediately below them) who practically monopolise the top positions of power, leadership, and dominance in all of the critical sectors of Purgation society (i.e., politics, law, governance, business, commerce, media, the professions, etc.). As wealth inequality grows in the Purgation State, the Purgation upper-class also continues to dominate major opportunities in society, by overwhelmingly sending their children to two elite, prestigious, and exclusionary high schools (L'Académie d'Excellence Scolaire de Savoy-Ducasse and L'École de la Fondation d'Amboise pour les Prodiges, the tuition fees of which are unaffordable to most middle-class families and which generally require high-placed connections amongst faculty and alumni to successfully pass a competitive admissions process) and then to the nation's two oldest and most prestigious universities (L'Université de Savoy-Ducasse and L'Université de Pétrus, which are overwhelmingly dominated by children from the Purgation upper-class due to a preferential selection process which advantages students from the above two ‘affiliated high schools’, with only a tiny minority of non-upper-class students drawn largely from the top strata of truly academically brilliant middle-class students who manage to triumph in an even more competitive admissions process), forming an unofficial de facto educational monopoly of Savoy-Ducasse and Pétrus which has only fuelled further frustrations and aggravations of the middle-class, many of whom have begun to view the present system as unfairly stacked against them and their children by according unfair advantages to well-connected upper-class children who are able to advance in society largely because of their ability to enter prestigious educational institutions in the 'Savoy-Ducasse-Pétrus' duopoly - which go on to produce most of the nation's top leaders - largely on account of the social caché and high-placed connections of their families which traverse the elite upper-class world of the Purgation haut monde, forming an exclusionary cartel which locks out nearly all of Purgation society save for the Les Enfants du Ciel, the more respectable of their Mélangé relations, and the more prestigious 'old money' upper-class Sain families which frequently travel and operate within their closed social circles and insular networks. As the elitism and discriminatory attitudes of the Purgation upper-class worsen over time, social mobility continues to decline, and the monopolisation of high-placed jobs and positions by high-placed, well-connected families remains unchecked, there may come a time when middle-class frustrations at the perceived hoarding of such economic opportunities for social ascent and advancement by the upper-class comes to exceed middle-class fears and anxieties over the potential for radicalism and revolutionary violence from the lower-class, at which point, the PNL's political longevity would be immediately imperilled and thrown into jeopardy.

For now, however, the overwhelming majority of the middle-class - which, due to their education and comparative social and cultural capital, are generally a well-read, well-informed, and highly politically engaged class, participating actively in political organisations, campaigns, petitions, online political discussions, and generally following and keeping up with current affairs and important news events impacting socio-political life in the Purgation State - remains tacitly supportive of the status quo and the continued rule of the PNL regime, if for no other reason than sheer middle-class terror and anxiety over the prospect of lower-class crime, rioting, hooliganism, anti-social behaviour, and the dreaded possibility of lower-class radicalism and revolutionary action, threatening to displace and dispossess the present economic privileges and the current social position of the middle-class, which many in the middle-class believe can only be kept at bay with the continued ruthless application of State violence against the so-called Dysfonctionnel to keep the 'disordered' elements of the lower-classes in check and under control. Amongst younger members of the middle-class, however, which are overwhelmingly college-educated and dominate civil society activism and the active political scene of most universities and college campuses throughout the nation, younger middle-class Purgations are largely drawn towards anti-government views and opinions that are supportive of human rights, liberal democracy, and constitutionally limited government, as an alternative to the present unelected one-party PNL regime imbued with absolutist and autocratic power. Young middle-class college students or colleged-educated youngsters are not generally drawn towards more radical left-wing extremism or the direct military action and insurgency of the Genetic Equality Movement (GEM), generally favouring the more non-violent underground student activist movements such as the Students' Association for a Democratic Purgatio (SADP) and the Purgation Youth Coalition for Democratisation (PYCD). Only time will tell, however, if these more socially liberal-minded attitudes of the younger segment of the Purgation middle-class are a temporary product of their youth, or will persist even until late adulthood and beyond. If its the latter, it does not bode well for the future stability of the PNL regime and the present (albeit tacit and somewhat reluctant) support that it receives from the current Purgation middle-class, which is so crucial and essential to enabling the ruling PNL government to remain in power.

by **Purgatio** » Sat Sep 16, 2023 9:29 pm

Lower Class (~59-65% of all Purgation households)

The largest of the four social classes in the present socio-economic structure and hierarchy of the Purgation State is the so-called 'lower class' (oftentimes referred to, arguably incorrectly, as the so-called 'working class'), referring to the class that has little to no real power or influence over the present rules and structure of the subject-community they belong to, and consequently vulnerable to the comparative power and influence of the ruling class (or 'upper class') to shape and determine the same. Within a financial capitalist economic system such as that of the Purgation State, and especially under Purgatio's present-day 'rentier-genocidal economy', that socially vulnerable and structurally powerless 'lower class' are the wage-labourers who have no access to liquid investible financial capital to profit from, and reap the fruits of, the present economic system, and are instead forced by the necessity of their circumstances (and the present economic structure) to sell their labour to the upper-class for their own sustenance and survival and to meet all of their basic needs, whether they want to or not. By virtue of being such a large class of persons, the Purgation lower-class is also the most heterogenous and variegated of the four social classes in terms of the variety and diversity of the economic experiences and relative fortunes of her members, embracing within its umbrella many higher-income workers and lower-income workers alike, who, despite the diversity of their incomes and resources, are nevertheless united by one key common characteristic - viz., their need to sell their labour in order to survive and their collective inability to profit from the present financial capitalist economy as a capital investor due to their absence of ownership of the necessary financial capital to do so.

By virtue of the sheer numbers of the Purgation lower-class, which consists of well over a billion persons between them and makes up around 70-77% of all free Purgation households and a whopping 59-65% of all Purgation households (inclusive of the Dysfonctionnel) - depending, of course, on where one chooses to place the minimum wealth and financial capital thresholds for the capital-owning upper-class and the 'mass affluent' middle-class - if the entirety of the Purgation lower-class were radicalised, class-conscious, and engaged in coordinated and orchestrated general action to overthrow the rule, power, and domination of the Purgation upper-class and middle-class, they would inevitably succeed through the power and strength of sheer mass and volume alone. The social stability of the present order of the Purgation State, and the political longevity of the PNL one-party regime, rests upon the Purgation lower-class lacking that sense of general class consciousness and solidarity, and their absence of any impetus to engage in such mass coordinated action. This is due to several key factors, which will be considered and summarised in turn.

First, there is the disjunct between class identity and class-based reality. Very few of the Purgation lower-class truly conceive of themselves as an oppressed and persecuted 'lower-class'. Surveys on social class in Purgatio consistently show that approximately half of respondents typically identify themselves as 'middle-class' - roughly four-tenths of the 'lower-class' - with the remainder generally identifying as 'working-class' rather than 'lower-class', a euphemism which starkly betrays the unwillingness of its users to perceive themselves as the victims of any socio-economic injustice or discrimination or any such relegation to any position of relative powerlessness within the prevailing social order of the Purgation State. This is especially the case for many members of the lower-classes who see themselves as 'middle-class', which is generally more prevalent amongst the comparatively 'comfortable' and more fortunate of the lower-class denizens. Due to the large breadth of this class category, average incomes vary widely between high-income wage-labourers and low-income wage-labourers. On one end of the spectrum, you have workers earning incomes in excess of US$60,000, not high enough to save and invest a decent amount to enter the 'mass affluent' middle-class, but certainly enough to comfortably meet a household's basic necessities alongside other creature comforts. On the other hand, you have unemployed members of the 'lower-class' (roughly one-sixth of that class) who are unable to make ends meet and struggle to hide the extent of their poverty and to find shelter and paid work as quickly as possible to avoid the terrible fate of genetic re-classification, and other impoverished members of the 'lower-class' who barely earn enough to make ends meet, having to piece together the insufficient incomes of a variety of ad hoc, 'on-call', 'moonlighting', or other part-time work to meet their regular day-to-day expenses, barely having enough to satisfy the very basic necessities of themselves and their dependents, with an estimated 27% of the population (and roughly one-fifth of the 'lower-class') falling below the international poverty line of having to live on less than US$6.85 a day.

Second, there is the additional problem of the disjunct between class identity versus racial-genetic identity (which intersects, to a substantial degree, with one's sense of national pride and identity as well). The dominant culture of the modern PNL-ruled Purgation State strongly emphasises the paramount, all-encompassing importance of one's genotype and racial-genetic classification, between the healthy and productive Sain and the parasitical and pathologically disordered Dysfonctionnel whose perverse genes must be cleansed from the Purgation national gene-pool to protect and defend the fruitfulness and vitality of the Sain and their national people's community that is the present Purgation State. Consequently, many lower-class Sain do not identify as members of a particular individual social class, but rather as part of a broader 'genetically healthy' Purgation national community, in contradistinction to the parasitical Dysfonctionnel internal elements of that community, which are injuring and prejudicing the strength of their national polity, and to the external Dysfonctionnel-controlled foreign nations which are said by the PNL regime to be dominated by the 'genetically disordered' elements of their gene-pools and domestic polities by virtue of their absence of eugenic policies and proper State action against the Dysfonctionnel of their communities, and which threaten to destroy and jeopardise the comparative 'genetic health' of the Purgation population group and the biological gene-pool thereof, amounting to a further internal division amongst the Purgation lower-classes and the various social identities thereof. Many such Purgation lower-class denizens who identify more strongly as a member of the racial-genetic Sain caste (and, by extension, with the national identity and community of the Purgation State, which is said by the PNL regime to be the only 'genetically healthy' polity in the world) than as a member of an oppressed 'lower-class' of exploited or mistreated wage-labourers, are likely to have taken up jobs which serve to prop up the existing PNL regime, as PAF soldiers, PPF police constables or 'beat cops', PICOS troopers or concentration camp guards, Purification Order paramilitary footsoldiers, undercover agents or secret paid informants for the Purgation security services or secret police, or as ordinary PNL rank-and-file party members, thereby securing their family's economic livelihood through stable employment earned through propping up the PNL regime's hold onto power by policing, controlling and/or spying on other potentially disruptive or troublesome elements of the Purgation lower-classes. In addition to that more pragmatic economic incentive, however, there is also a natural impetus and a comparative psychological attraction towards believing that one is a member of an innately superior, rightfully privileged, dominant Sain racial-genetic caste, than to believe or accept that one is a downtrodden, exploited, oppressed member of a persecuted social class that is powerless and vulnerable within the present social order, which also serves to draw more conservative-minded members of the Purgation lower-class towards the former worldview over the latter.

Third, of the four social classes, the Purgation lower-class is the most disaffected and politically apathetic and disengaged, due to a variety of factors. Higher education is a rarer commodity amongst the lower-class, only around one-sixth of the lower-class denizens hold a college degree and only about one-fifth of lower-class young people will ever have the opportunity to attend university or higher education more generally due to the upfront cost of attaining a college degree as well as the opportunity cost of spending so many years out of the labour workforce which an economically unstable household can ill-afford to swallow. Consequently, the lower-classes are comparatively deprived of the same access to the intellectual, social, and cultural capital of the upper-class and middle-class which lends those classes to be more engaged in political affairs and to regularly follow and keep up with socio-political happenings throughout the nation, whether it is participating in political campaigns, keeping abreast of politics-related news reports, partaking in civil society, or by engaging in intellectual debate and discussion with friends or family on various political affairs. This is not to say that all lower-class denizens are politically disaffected, of course, there is a substantial minority of the lower-class (both the college-educated and the non-college-educated), who do have a personal interest in political affairs and political philosophy and who pursue that interest on their own accord, especially many lower-class young people, and for those who do, more often than not, politically engaged members of the lower-classes tend to be more drawn to far-left socialistic and communistic ideas which are stalwartly opposed and hostile to the present regime, with the more radicalised extremists within the lower-class even taking up arms against the regime by joining the ongoing violent resistance and insurgency of the Genetic Equality Movement (GEM). However, by and large, most lower-class persons in Purgatio are fairly cynical, disaffected, and politically apathetic and disengaged, not only because of their lack of access to the same intellectual and socio-cultural capital as the upper-and-middle-classes, but also because of their own desperate and unstable economic circumstances. The economically insecure and financially unstable life of a typical lower-class family, defined by the juggling of various odd-jobs, transient employment in the labour market, and lowly-paid work with depressed wages which are often, insufficient, by itself, to sustain one's basic needs in the absence of being supplemented with further 'moonlighting' or part-time employment, tends to leave little additional time or mental and emotional energy to worry or concern oneself with higher-order abstract thinking or endless philosophising about the grander scheme of things or how the broader social and political structure of Purgation society as a whole ought to be re-structured or re-ordered. There is also a psychological 'scarcity mentality' at play here, in which transient and unstable employment and the balancing of different odd-jobs and part-time work makes for a vulnerable and precarious livelihood which, naturally, inclines most lower-class persons to be pragmatically-minded and extremely hard-nosed, concerned solely with securing the immediate livelihood and survival of themselves and their immediate friends and family. Under the constraints of such circumstances, it is not surprising that most lower-class persons are politically apathetic and disengaged, as their limited mental and emotional energies are often dedicated solely and exclusively towards their day-to-day worries and concerns, lacking the additional wherewithal to worry about broader national politics or abstract philosophical and ideological debates and discussions about how the larger social structure of the Purgation State ought to be changed or re-ordered.

Finally, this last point is logically related to the final reason for the absence of any broader mass uprising or generalised revolt of the lower-class, and that is the classic 'collective action problem'. Since broader collective action is necessary for any such revolt to suceed, there is not only no impetus for individual action in the absence of broader communal organisation and solidarity, but a particularly strong disincentive against doing so, since a handful of lower-class individuals deciding, on their own, to stage a revolution against the ruling PNL government only means that they will inevitably condemn themselves to a hellish, brutish, and tortuous life as Dysfonctionnel slave labourers who will be painfully worked to death inside one of the country's over 49,000 'liquidation facilities'. Left-wing workers' organisations or associations for the mass organisation of the lower-classes have not existed on a large scale ever since the political persecution of the political left and the forceful destruction of any independent labour unions or labour movements when the PNL rose to power in its coup of 1987-1988. Organising a broader revolt of a critical mass of the lower-class is difficult given the extremely strong personal incentive to abstain from so doing. A member of the lower-class might secure an easier, simpler, and more stable route to personal economic security, on a solely individual level, by taking up a job that props up the PNL regime (i.e., as a PAF soldier, a PPF police constable, a PICOS trooper, etc.), which represents a far more convenient and accessible route to secure a modicum of socio-political power and some economic and financial stability for oneself and one's family than joining a highly-risky rebellion or revolution that has a high chance of ending in failure (and in one's tortuous enslavement and brutal eradication) and will only succeed on the condition that numerous other lower-class persons independently decide to take on that rather extreme risk and act in a fashion that is contrary to their individual self-interest and places their safety and economic well-being (and that of their families) in immediate short-term jeopardy - or in other words, a rather classic 'prisoners' dilemma'. Many of the more risk-averse lower-class persons - especially those who are politically apathetic and disaffected and far more concerned with their own immediate individual needs or financial circumstances than any broader abstract political or ideological project - who may have an existing wage-paying job (or jobs) that meets the basic needs of themselves and their families may be unwilling to jeopardise that present position for a faint promise of a potential different future which may appear to them to be impossible to attain, overly abstract and unpragmatic, and would come at great personal cost to achieve unless many other lower-class individuals were to voluntarily choose to place themselves at risk of suffering the same.

This is not to say, however, that the present poor economic conditions for the lower-classes do not pose a threat at all to the social stability or general good order of the present Purgation society. The deprived conditions of many lower-income neighbourhoods in Purgatio, especially neighbourhoods in which unemployment is particularly prevalent or are filled with lower-income workers who have seen their wages stagnate or fail to keep up with inflation (and thereby declining in real terms), represents a hotbed for bouts of violent rioting, vandalism, and hooliganism by more frustrated, outraged, incensed, or infuriated denizens of the lower-classes, with those frustrations and resentments broiling over into heated episodes of violent public disturbances of inner-city youth running riot and rampage within the poorest boroughs of various highly-concentrated major metropolitan areas of the country. There is a big difference, however, between isolated, disparate, and unorganised bouts of rioting and mass violence, which can eventually be mopped up and contained with brute force by the regular armed forces and the militarised police force, versus a larger-scale organised rebellion or revolt, with the synchronised and coordinated actions of a critical mass of the lower-class, all working in concert and in harmony in service of a unified political project to achieve the same objective and end-goal, working together to dismantle the current regime and the present state of affairs. Mass violence amongst the lower-classes, more often than not, takes the form of the former variety, more so than the latter. The only exception (arguably) is the ongoing GEM insurgency and resistance, which is actively attempting to overthrow the PNL government by force, and which the more motivated and ideologically radicalised members of the lower-classes do take up arms to join. If more and more members of the Purgation lower-class ever come to be so motivated and radicalised, and if the size of the GEM resistance movement (or some other alternative organised rebellion) were to swell to a critical mass in the future, the PNL regime's political longevity and the sustainability of its continued hold onto political power would come to be seriously threatened and credibly jeopardised.

The Purgation State: Detailed National Factbook [READ ONLY]

The Purgation State: Detailed National Factbook [READ ONLY]

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