Part VIII: Paris
While Lord Kitchener had failed to stop the Invasion, he was right to believe that the Entente would have broken in the face of a major defeat. The proof appeared in Bruges, as the alliance collapsed in the face of Victory.
Representatives of two Kaisers, one Emperor, and a Tsar did the real work with their massive committees, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, holding a position that no one took any value in, having just been created for himself, and eventually representatives from the other Commonwealth nations, the Ottomans, and Portuguese, were for practical purposes kept in the complete dark while their respective treaties were hashed out between partners that had drastically divergent views of what the post-war world would need to look like.
The Bulgarians, whose assault on Constantinople had been the damned fool thing to turn off the lights and start the fires, of course had say in British affairs, spending most of the conference trying to gain as much territory in Anatolia as possible in spite of the combined weight of Berlin, Budapest, Paris and Vienna. The British Army in Salonica had been besieged by a majority Bulgarian Force, and as such there was hope in the regime in Tsargrad that such could be traded into a colonial possession, talk ranging from Malta to the Levant or the Horn of Africa.
Berlin of course, dreamed that the war would mark their final triumph, and the conference would serve to gain them their place in the sun, as the dominant power in Europe and the leading European power in the world. Inevitably, neither Habsburg or Bonaparte was particularly keen to drop a knee to Wilhelm in this manner, creating one of the big sticking points of the conference, the Prussian need for secret clauses on dealing with the neutral and already defeated powers of Europe, and the public clauses carving up the British Empire.
Vienna, under Franz Ferdinand simply sought calm. With Italy defeated, Serbia isolated, mountains of concessions having had to be offered to the various nationalities, and the power of the military had been united and empowered by victories the monarchy had the first chance chance at security in seventy years. The only problem left seemed to be the political chaos of the East. With the threat of the Popular Front casting a shadow over an Empire that had seen a sharp uptick of labor unrest, the weakening Britain needed to be strategically planned, to empower the Entente while preventing the horrors of a Wobbly Scotland or a Leninist London, the horror of a radical Ireland was more than enough to see the Austrian and Hungarian representatives see eye-to-eye mostly. While some talk was made about colonies, the Habsburg Kaiser was far more interested in revising the fate of the Eastern concessions taken from Russia.
Geography had played against the two of them though when it came to British policy. A few Austrian torpedo boat crews had partaken in the running battle across the channel and a Hungarian-Croatian brigade had been attached to a Bavarian Division which landed near Dover, but beyond that neither ally had taken part in the decisive campaign of the war against Britain. As such their main power would come from their conversations with the French and Germans and helping one or the other come out on top.
Berlin and Paris were trapped with each other. While it had been French grain that fed the German workers in their factories, it had been German workers who made the helmets, guns, gas and munitions that had kept the French soldier in the field. Neither nation could offer a united front on its own about what to do with the British, much less agree with the other.
Suez had been an easy enough issue, as the old Anglo-French co-ownership was restored and transferred to a Franco-German one. For colonies sized in the war, restoration to their proper Entente overlords. But everyone dreamed of dominating India, and dispatched fleets to do so. And all dreamed of rewriting the map of Africa, wiping out in swift strokes the empires of Britain and Portugal who had been foolish enough to follow her into war. The matter was simply how.
In the German Camp, Chancellor Kapp was fervent in his belief in the hardest of hardline stances. His plan would see the German though make relatively minor gains in Africa --- all of the Portuguese Empire, from Mozambique to Katanga to Cape Verde, along with a few British Colonies, such as that of the lands of the British South Africa Company --- with his primary focus being in the east. Ceylon, Malaya, Borneo, Singapore and Calcutta and Hong Kong should all, he belived, fly the German Flag. India as a series of German protectorates would be secured with military force, a Political office, and a few concessions to the French.
His sovereign on the other hand was erratic. Wilhelm II, never a calm and consistent man, could at lunch one day be utterly convinced that the only justified settlement of the end of the war was to create some sort of vast German Raj in East Africa, with complete Independence for the Indians, to insisting at midday that Germany’s future lay in keeping Britain strong in India, and using that as a springboard to conquer China for Germany’s Jewel and finishing at dinner declaring that Germany’s fate lay in securing ‘living space’ in the East and colonies more than fortified coaling stations be damned. Any unnecessary issue from the status of Luxembourg to claims that Germany had a right to annex neutral Madagascar out from under a French Sphere of Influence caused great trouble. In the end this can be in some way explained, caught between a defeated cousin, an allied uncle and another cousin awaiting a show trial and execution in Moscow, his already unsteady focus was simply utterly unable to see a way to rebalance the world without painful costs.
Other German diplomats and politicians involved in the conference, present or not, of course had their own ideas as well. Meaning just about anything was up for grabs.
Napoleon IV on the other hand was consistent in his views on the matter, though the French delegations troubles would come from the uppity Prime Ministers and legislators whom failed to understand their place in French Politics, thinking that the war would have somehow brought about an end to the rule of a dynasty as grounded in 1918 as it had been anarchic to the systems of Europe in 1812. The son-in-law of Queen Victoria and Great-Grand-Nephew of the Corsican Genius could see Britain in a multitude of different ways, but chose only one course to act on. If Germany was going to try and dominate the world he would need to stop them, to secure Frances place as a permanently Great power in her own right, and that would require counterbalances and with the decreasing population of France that could only mean detente with the British and to permanently tie them to continental affairs. For this he envisioned a strategic deconstruction of the British Empire, but one which would maintain critical components, such as a rump Raj would remain. After necessary transfers were made, and a maintenance of protectorates in the Persian Gulf and Arabia could be kept, it would tie them down to confront the coming German domination of the old Ottoman Empire. France would of course make gains, domination of Egypt and an annexation of Ethiopia finally allowing the dream of a Djibouti-to-Dakar line to become true, empowering the nation drastically, and Germany would be allowed to take some prizes too, but Britain would be allowed to maintain enough of an empire to remain strong. Against either the Prussians or the Popular Front, whatever the threat could be.
The problem with this was that the French draftees and public, and their assembly members, led by Prime Minister Maurice Rouvier who having come to power as a hardliner, was determined to end the problems with the English once and for all. Not only was he determined to see the Empire dismantled once and for all, it was he who first introduced the idea of partition, with French and German nobility to gain thrones in Scotland and Wales.
There were only two issues that that nearly everyone in the Entente talks could agree too. The first was the simple solution to that of the Dominions, complete independence for them all. As no one was particularly interested in traveling to Western Australia or Newfoundland to put someone's cousin on a made up throne, Republics were deemed more than enough to sever the ties to the mother country politically, besides prohibitive treaties of course.
And the other commonality was that Britain would be squeezed for every cent it had. Billions of Dollars worth of war debts would be paid off, and profits would be gained by indemnities to be placed on the British as they had the Russians and Italians, to be paid in gold, or kind. As harsh as this would prove to be, it was necessary as none of the three Entente powers had bothered to actually finance their wars soundly. And while economists from each country would argue about just how much was to be taken, it became a political necessity when Rouvier declared that the Second Empire and its colonies would become a home fit for the heroic figures of the war. With the Popular Front threat rising, social reform was the only way to ensure the peace, and it was to be a social reform paid for by British punitive debt.
Meanwhile in their own Hotels the last of the allied powers waited, for word on what the treaty would look like and what the word was from their respective homes. Soon though, as everything seemed to be, even this would fall apart as events in Britain would overtake Donald Maclean and his peers and leave them without any authority.
Anyway, in scenarios of French victory over the United Kingdom I've though of, I always have included the food shortage as a major reason for British defeat, slightly expanding the OTL German strategy during WWI, but then I included the United States in the game. 
