Hey guys and gals, first of all I want to apologize for lagging it. I mean, yeah I'm normally bad with updates, but I said I was gonna post this one...what, 11 days ago? I've been really busy looking for a job, and now that I got it I've been busy with that. Good news is I finally have the update ready. Now I can move on with this thing (and I've been itching to get back to Mexico and the ACW).
The Great European War: 1849-1857
The Allied Forces capture Sevastopol, 1850
There is a saying attributed to the European wars of 1848,
”il a commencé en France, et il a terminé en France.”[1] While it stretches the truth a little, it was to an extent true that the February Revolution in Paris was what truly set the continent ablaze. Ironically it was also in France that the reactionary forces won out in the months that followed. Known as the June Days, thousands of leftist protestors overran the French capital, briefly taking control of the city before it was brutally put down by the military. While these actions, sanctioned by the Provisional Government, restored order, it gravely injured the public’s confidence with those in power.
Across the Channel, these events were closely monitored by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the first Napoleon and claimant to the Imperial throne. Despite the Provisional Government’s best efforts to keep him out of French politics, Louis-Napoléon easily managed to get elected to several departments in the National Assembly, all while in exile. With presidential elections approaching, Louis Napoleon raced across the Channel and formally entered the election. His opponents quickly dismissed him, operating under the assumption that his long periods living outside of France would work against him. This proved to be a great miscalculation, as the Napoleonic name still resonated positively among the French masses. Aided by his uncle’s former generals, Louis-Napoléon’s campaign exceeded all expectations, securing an astounding 75% of the votes and becoming the first President of France.
Back across the Channel, the United Kingdom proved it too was not immune to the revolutionary fervor which gripped all of Europe. The failed efforts at reform by Parliament the previous decade served only to radicalize many Britons, made even worse by King Ernest’s reactionary policies. The failure of reformers during the preceding decade had caused a radical shift among the kingdom’s growing middle class, and the failure to pass Catholic emancipation (coupled with the worst of the potato famine) sparked a bloody civil war in nearby Ireland in the months prior to 1848. After the fall of Louis-Philippe’s regime, pressure mounted on the government once again to pass meaningful reform. In April a new Chartist convention converged on London to petition Parliament to adopt their platform. It is difficult to place an exact figure on the number of people which gathered in the British capital, but modern estimates place it between 100,000 and 300,000 people. When Parliament refused to entertain these petitions, the crowds grew more restive. Despite warnings by the police for Chartists to remain peaceful, fights between Chartists and police soon erupted into riots.[2]
Similar occurrences in north and central England soon flared into revolts, with revolutionary bands gaining control of Manchester and much of Yorkshire later that spring, all united with the expressed purpose of deposing King Ernest. For a moment it seemed the Empire would come asunder, as defections from the military bolstered the British revolutionary ranks, and calls for a republic soon reverberated throughout the countryside. The revolutionaries never made it to London, however, as Loyalists under the Viscount Hardinge handed them a crushing defeat at the Battle of Newhall, south of Derby on the River Trent. Revolutionary fervor continued to fester throughout northern England and Wales late into the summer and early autumn, but for the moment it seemed the Kingdom had regained its footing.
The Lord Macaulay, British Prime Minister
Nevertheless, the events of 1848 assured the United Kingdom would never be the same again. The unpopular King Ernest, whom had fled London to the Isle of Wight that previous May when London was set ablaze, felt he was left with little option but to abdicate. In a rather lackluster coronation ceremony at Westminster, the Prince of Wales assumed the regnal name George V in early November. The new king called upon the Marquess of Lansdowne to be the new Prime Minister, but he declined. After an exhaustive search (and to his displeasure of choosing a Whig for fear of inciting any more unrest), the King settled on Thomas Babington Macaulay, whom assumed the Premiership after the New Year.[3]
The Lord Macaulay committed himself to reform from the outset, pushing through Catholic emancipation early in his term (echoing the Netherland’s move to enfranchise their own Catholic population after Dutch King Willem II consented to a new constitution the year before). Reforms were slow after that, with the outbreak of all-out war that summer, but the Prime Minister promised to pass a meaningful reform act once events on the continent calmed down.
In light of the previous year’s events, Prime Minister Macaulay came to an agreement with French President Bonaparte to form an informal alliance with the purpose of bringing order back to Europe. Their primary concern proved to be Prussia, which had taken advantage of the chaos and invaded several other member states of the now defunct German Confederation, including Mecklenburg, Holstein and Hesse, as well as brutally suppressing the movement for Rhenish independence. In June both the United Kingdom and France issued ultimata demanding Prussia evacuate the states it had occupied. Prussia responded by amassing troops on the border with Hanover.
Prussian Army fighting Danes in Holstein
In early July the Prussian Army marched in full force into Westphalia, overrunning the Ruhr Valley with relative ease. The Hanoverians proved more of a challenge, at least initially, defeating the Prussians at the Battles of Salzgitter and Wolfburg. Superior numbers eventually tipped the scales in Berlin’s favor and on August 2 Viceroy Adolphus capitulated to Prussian forces. Afterwards the Prussians easily rolled over the rest of the northwestern plains, capturing Oldenburg and Wilhelmshaven two weeks later. From that point Rhenish resistance hardened, as the Prussian push southwards down the Rhine slowed down significantly. The Prussians won battles both at Köln and Bonn, but the rougher terrain away from the river proved to be somewhat of a haven for Rhenish fighters.
It was not until September that the Prussians faced a true challenged, at Koblenz. For several weeks the defenders of the city ensured the Prussian Army progressed no further, as well as allowing enough time for an evacuation of Parliamentarians from Frankfurt to Darmstadt, then once more to Worms. The defense of Frankfurt was also exceptional, despite its evacuation the Prussians had to take the city street by street. By mid-October the German Parliamentarians were on the run once again, traveling to Saarbrücken on the French border. The Rhenish Provisional Government, in desperation, requested French aid, and over the next few days the amassed Anglo-French allied troops crossed into the Rhineland before engaging their Prussian counterparts at the Battle of Ramstein. Now more evenly matched, the Prussians managed to hold off against the allied forces at first, before being forced back to the Rhine.
Prussia was not alone in its territorial ambitions. Despite its disastrous incursion into Hungary, the Russian Empire still commanded troops in the Danubian Principalities, a fact which incensed Sultan Abdülmecid of the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottomans refused to surrender suzerainty of Moldavia and Wallachia to Russia, Tsar Nikolai used that as a pretext to cross the Danube and invade Rumelia. Following the declarations of war on Prussia, the Allied Powers both agreed to aid the Ottoman Empire in fighting the Russians.
In the beginning the Russians managed to secure some victories along the Black Sea coast, taking all of Dobruja and much of the southern bank of the Danube by the end of 1849. The Russians had anticipated that the region’s Orthodox population would rise in rebellion and welcome the Russians with open arms, but to their shock and dismay nothing of the sort ever materialized. The Ottomans took advantage of this mishap and under the leadership of Omar Pasha dealt the Russian’s first defeat at the Battle of Silistra, pushing the Russians back into Wallachia. In March 1850 the Russians tried once again to invade Rumelia, but proved unable to cross the Danube again.
Russians and Ottomans engaged in fierce combat
Later that spring the Allied Forces arrived in the region, with French warships laying siege to Köstence, soon followed by an Anglo-French attack on the Russian Fleet at Sevastopol. The Allies made little headway at first, failing to take Köstence but securing a victory at Sevastopol. The Russians were forced to move troops out of Dobruja and the Principalities in order to defend the Crimea, allowing Omar Pasha to retake all of the Ottoman’s lost European territory after defeating a token Russian garrison at the Battle of Bucharest in August 1850. The fighting between the Russians and the Allied Forces soon became a bloody stalemate, as the Russians became focused on extricating the Allies from Russian soil. Despite some minor victories by the Allies in and around the Sea of Azov, as well as attempts to aid a Cossack uprising in Ukraine, the front lines changed little heading into 1851.
An Allied blockade of the Baltic Sea, combined with a massive revolt in Congress Poland which had been raging since the previous year, managed to hasten Russia’s eventual capitulation, with a disillusioned Tsar Nikolai consenting to seek peace in May 1851. Prussia followed soon after, as the Allied-Rhenish armies had managed to retake Frankfurt and the Ruhr Valley, and had pushed the Prussians to a line along the Weser and Warra Rivers. War fatigue in both the United Kingdom and France had reached critical heights by mid-1851, so all the engaged powers agreed to bring the war to an end.[4]
The HMS Britannia on blockade duty, near Heligoland
At the behest of President Bonaparte, the powers agreed to convene in Paris for the peace proceedings, and after several weeks of deliberations their representatives signed the Treaty of Paris in June, nearly two years after the war began. Like so many other treaties of the same name, this one radically changed the face of Europe forever. The north German states were divided amongst Prussia (which was permitted to consolidate the territories it still held at the cessation of hostilities save for Hanover and Saxony), Bavaria, Württemberg and the newly created Kingdom of the Rhineland. Despite vocal protests from the German delegations, France was allowed to keep territories it had forcibly taken in southern Baden early on in the war, as well as the Francophone cantons of Switzerland.[5] Russia was forced to recognize Ottoman control of the Danubian Principalities, and in exchange the Allied Forces would evacuate territories they held in the Crimea. The only region in Europe which was not properly addressed in the treaty was the Italian Peninsula, namely Naples absorption of the Papal States (minus Rome, which was under French occupation at the Pope’s behest). A separate agreement in 1855 had all the major powers recognize Neapolitan control of both Sicily and the Papal States, though the status of Rome proved to be a thorn in Franco-Italian relations for years to come.
A separate peace treaty would end the war between Austria and Hungary in 1853. Emperor Ferdinand was pressured into abdicating in early 1849 in favor of his nephew Franz Josef, who attempted unsuccessfully to return Hungary to the Austrian fold. A stout reactionary, Franz Josef was assassinated by a disgruntled Austrian officer in early 1853 and was succeeded by his younger brother Maximillian.[6] That following April representatives of Austria, Hungary and Russia met at Pressburg, and in the resulting peace treaty Vienna acknowledged Hungary as an independent nation, formally establishing all of the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen as Hungary’s domain. Austria also grudgingly ceded Galicia to Russia, which had
de facto control of the region since 1849.
Prince-President, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte
The war’s outcome was seen by many as a vindication of what democratic nations could accomplish in the face of absolutism. True to his word Prime Minister Macaulay worked with Parliament and passed the Reform Act 1854, which greatly reformed the Kingdom’s electoral system and expanded the franchise to over 300,000 British subjects. For many British reformers it was a good start, but they knew they had a long way to go before the Kingdom could be considered a true democracy. Some were even keen to look toward France, where universal male suffrage reigned and over nine million Frenchmen could vote. Unlike its first incarnation, the Second Republic as it was known seemed to be doing great. Then with very little warning, outgoing President Bonaparte orchestrated a coup d’état against the Republic and with supposed popular support extended his mandate. Exactly one year after his coup—December 2, 1852—President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was crowned in Paris as Napoléon III. The French Empire was reborn.
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Notes
[1] French for "It began in France, and it ended in France." For the record my French isn't all that good...at all...so if it looks weird please let me know and I'll fix it.
[2] In OTL this did occur, but the protesters and police didn't start killing each other. This time around the crowds are more radicalized, and the British government more repressive, so something was gonna give sooner or later.
[3] Credit for some of the events in the UK's 1848 and the choice of PM belongs to Charles James Fox, here's a
link to his List of Prime Ministers for a more reactionary Britain.
[4] The war is more or less an expy on the Crimean War, only happening a few years early with a more out of control First Schleswig War.
[5] One thing I couldn't fit into the update was Switzerland's breakup following a more crazy Sonderbund War. After the declarations of war against Prussia, France takes the opportunity to "protect" the
Suisse romande. All the powers (even the UK) were pretty pissed at France for it, but when all was said and done no one was in any mood to force France on the issue.
[6] Similar to OTL, except instead of a Hungarian nationalist it's a disgruntled Austrian soldier who aims at the Emperor's neck. This time Franz Josef is unlucky in the encounter and dies from his injuries.
