A Dismantled France.

So I was reading a book on the Congress of Vienna and playing some Victoria 2 and was wondering; what if Metternich really hated France and decided to dismantle it into separate States to eliminate it once and for all. So my thoughts are

1: It would probably be based on Linguistic ties and not just Annexing Normandy and Franca-Comte for the lulz.

2: the most "loyal" governments would probably be based in the South of France and Brittany who were Occitan and Breton respectfully

3: Every Great Power would have like a Sphere of influence in France. For example, Britain influences Brittany and Spain influences Occitania and so

4: Picard area's would be ceded to Belgium to at least sorta balance out Prussia.

But that's all I'm coming up with, maybe someone else can go from another angle?
 
We already discussed this, and the answer is not after Napoleon. We need them to really hate France, not just blame Napoleon. We need France to commit atrocities to get them to do this/
 
We already discussed this, and the answer is not after Napoleon. We need them to really hate France, not just blame Napoleon. We need France to commit atrocities to get them to do this/


Would it be possible for Napoleon to take a much harsher stance on Spanish guerillas during the Peninsular war?
 
Maybe a smaller version of what the OP suggests could be done without Talleyrand's negotiation skills. Take him out of the picture and replace him with some incompetent idiot, and who knows what might happen.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Dismantling states into fascinating new entities is always fun in AH, and in some ways France is an attractive target because it has long tended to be one of the most centralising countries in Europe. The contrast between that OTL nature and ATL division is therefore fun and interesting. Yet I'm afraid that cutting France to bits runs completely counter to what the Congress of Vienna was supposed to achieve. Absolutely no-one wanted France gone. They wanted France to be not too strong and not too weak, and most importantly, they wanted it to be a monarchy. Even if every single person even vaguely related to the French royal family was somehow dead, they would have just installed another dynasty.

Best case scenario for this kind of division is if the direct heirs to the French throne are all horribly murdered in the revolution (or die later on during their exile), and multiple rival distant claimants pop up, each supported by different countries. And at the same time, the French republic goes/stays totally bananas, with the Cult of Reason causing all sorts of horrors and Republican France just generally becoming the very image of "everything that's evil" in the minds of European monarchs. Under such conditions, they may just be convinced to end the French threat for good, and the rival claimants might then lead to the idea of carving up France and giving them all a separate fief.

...and that's a maybe. I'd still call it a long shot.
 
Best case scenario for this kind of division is if the direct heirs to the French throne are all horribly murdered in the revolution (or die later on during their exile), and multiple rival distant claimants pop up, each supported by different countries. And at the same time, the French republic goes/stays totally bananas, with the Cult of Reason causing all sorts of horrors and Republican France just generally becoming the very image of "everything that's evil" in the minds of European monarchs. Under such conditions, they may just be convinced to end the French threat for good, and the rival claimants might then lead to the idea of carving up France and giving them all a separate fief.

...and that's a maybe. I'd still call it a long shot.

Maybe not a long shot if THAT happens.

So let's suppose the French revolutionaries go bananas for a decade, but their armies also rape pilliage and burn when on German territory. By now, people must be fed up. And suppose that many claimants died in the revolution and the Spanish Bourbons are butterflied away. http://www.alternatehistory.com/for...volution-failed-early-but-no-claimant.418336/

That scenario I posted was about finding a claimant and the French revolution being stopped early. Suppose it goes on for a decade but the claimants alive and dead are the same as that post.
 
So let's suppose the French revolutionaries go bananas for a decade, but their armies also rape pilliage and burn when on German territory. By now, people must be fed up. And suppose that many claimants died in the revolution and the Spanish Bourbons are butterflied away. http://www.alternatehistory.com/for...volution-failed-early-but-no-claimant.418336/

That scenario I posted was about finding a claimant and the French revolution being stopped early. Suppose it goes on for a decade but the claimants alive and dead are the same as that post.

I doubt it. The powers wanted to turn back the clock, and would want to turn back the clock in any scenario. And that means returning France to its former state as a monarchy.
 
I doubt it. The powers wanted to turn back the clock, and would want to turn back the clock in any scenario. And that means returning France to its former state as a monarchy.

In my post timeline, the powers wanted to turn back the clock. The stupid revolution was nipped in the bud early and now we just need to agree on a claimant since... well it seems they ran out of close relatives and need to search FAR.

By the way, if you think a particular claimant would be agreed by both the Austrians and the British, just put a like to whichever guy said it.

Would they ant to merely turn back the clock after 10 years of Revolutionary Atrocities? Let's add in violating truces and taking no quarter. How can anyone not feel rage at France with that? in OTL, the crown prince of Prussia was not in Berlin at the War of the Thrid Coalition, but on a random boarder town that COULD have ended up in the path of the French (they took another path). What if there was no Napoleon and the Repbulic forces took that path and killed the prince in addition to rape pilliage and burning in every German hamlet?
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Maybe not a long shot if THAT happens.

So let's suppose the French revolutionaries go bananas for a decade, but their armies also rape pilliage and burn when on German territory. By now, people must be fed up. And suppose that many claimants died in the revolution and the Spanish Bourbons are butterflied away. http://www.alternatehistory.com/for...volution-failed-early-but-no-claimant.418336/

That scenario I posted was about finding a claimant and the French revolution being stopped early. Suppose it goes on for a decade but the claimants alive and dead are the same as that post.

The longer a really radical French regime lasts, and the more it manages to (be perceived to have succeeded in an effort to) "indoctrinate" the French population, the greater the likelihood of an "end the French danger forever"-mentality becomes.

One might imagine a scenario wherein France is finally defeated/conquered/liberated somewhere in the 1810s, having been under a drastic regime for twenty years or more. If the regime is really out there, ideologically speaking, keeping it going for that long probably requires an ATL hugely charismatic genius leader/warlord (basically a Napoleon analogue who seizes power almost at once after the revolution) who is, however, ideologically in line with Jacques Hébert and Anacharsis Cloots. Better yet: one who thinks along their lines, but in a more extremist way. If you give such a man over two decades, he can probably make France really hated by every other power, and make all foreign monarchs believe that the French people itself is now "poisoned" and thus too dangerous to be allowed to just exist freely as a united nation.

Then you add the death of all direct claimants to the French throne, and you have multiple more distant claimants, each backed by a different foreign power. Once France is defeated, they decide to carve France up, hand one of the 'successor states' to each of the multiple claimants, forbid French reunification by treaty, and have each 'post-French state' secured (i.e. occupied) by the country that backed the claim of its new monarch. As the wartime coalition ends, and the powers of Europe watch each other warily again, French reunification grows ever more distant. Given their fear of 'Frenchness' itself, they may encourage non-French cultural elements, such as elevating various local languages/dialects to official status and making French unofficial. After several decades of that, French reunion is basically off the table.

But as I said, that takes a pretty extreme situation. It's a long shot even with the premise above. Everything needs to go just "right" to get this result. It's not ASB, but it's just very, very far from the likely outcome.
 
Last edited:
Would they ant to merely turn back the clock after 10 years of Revolutionary Atrocities? Let's add in violating truces and taking no quarter. How can anyone not feel rage at France with that? in OTL, the crown prince of Prussia was not in Berlin at the War of the Thrid Coalition, but on a random boarder town that COULD have ended up in the path of the French (they took another path). What if there was no Napoleon and the Repbulic forces took that path and killed the prince in addition to rape pilliage and burning in every German hamlet?

If you turn all Jacobins into people worse than Hitler, sure, but that's not a plausible scenario.
 
If you turn all Jacobins into people worse than Hitler, sure, but that's not a plausible scenario.

Ha ha ha. First off, fairly plausible. More importantly, they don't have to be that bad.

Rape pilliage and burn was done in the 30 years war and tends to happen when you don't pay your troops. And... this is plausible. Taking no quarter is common among ill-disciple troops.

Most of Frances armies were conscripts. Put in some revolutionary fevor and telling the troops about the evil monarchists and you got a mob mentality. Poof, that was easy. Now how do you think the powers that be (Britain, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark) would think after 5, 8, 10, or even 30 years of this nonsense and no male descendants of Louis XIII left?
 
I think that the most realistic solution for a Dismantled France is a "Confederation" of French Kingdoms that's loosely joined together but each has significant autonomous that weakens the central authority making sure that a French threat to the rest of Europe is neutered.
 
This was discussed just a couple of days ago.

I don't think this can ever happen following the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars because the consensus among the other heads of state was that the Republic/Empire were illegitimate and that the Bourbons had a right to the throne that was taken from them. To reduce France to less than its 1789 borders would be punishing a monarch who had been on the side of the coalitions the whole time.

The way you can have France dismembered is for one of the Bourbons themselves to be the big scary warmonger, and then ultimately get crushed. This isn't necessarily far-fetched; there was a point in the middle of the war of the Spanish Succession where Louis XIV was prepared to sign away all of France's conquests since 1648, but the allies pushed him too far (forcing him to attack his own grandson in Spain) and he fought on, and his armies managed to turn the tide.
 
Top