AH Challenge: Co-Existing & Equal French and German Empires

Find a way to form stable French and German empires in Europe. They can dislike each other, but reasons of stability suggest they should probably have reached some sort of accord over the status of the rest of Europe that is mutually agreeable

Somewhere between and including Napoleon III to early-ending or utterly modified WWI (I like all those little kingdoms that vanished). Earlier is okay, but I'm looking for something that can work—if somewhat anachronistically—into the present day. Client states and spheres of influence are acceptable to France actually sprawling across Spain and Italy or Germany sweeping through DoD sized borders.

You can have outside threats (Russia, the USA, the British) to foster a Continental Entente against the dark hordes. Neutral powers that exist on sufferance (the Netherlands, Scandinavia) and large and powerful but nonetheless client states (Spain, Ottoman Empire) are fine. So is Japan or other non-Great Power non-client/sphere of influence states.

Ideally Paris and Berlin should (separately) have the punching weight and influence of any other Great Power.

(If this has been done I couldn't find it through the search engine. Invariably someone dominates Europe.)
 

Baskilisk

Banned
Wow, that's a tough one. The big problem is, France and Germany are inevitable archrivals, it's just the fact the land around the Rhine river is so heavily contested between the two, I don't think the two could realistically coexist as dominant powers without a huge conflict every generation. Consider the history of the two over the last few centuries.
 
Actually, this one could have happened if Germany didn't annex Alsace-Lorraine after their victory in 1870. I believe Bismarck wasn't very excited about the idea-- maybe he knew that the A-L'ers were attached to the French state (a fact that caused the Wilhelmine Empire lots of headaches). Most of the Reichstag deputies sent from A-L after 1871 were from separatist parties, so I assume a plebescite would have also gone against Germany.

How to accomplish this, given the victorious German nationalists' drive to annex? Bismarck allows a plebescite which results in A-L remaining French, and backs off the exorbitant reparations payments. Remember, Prussia managed to restrain itself and not march on Vienna in 1866, and that helped Austria-Hungary stay on the German side in spite of the Hapsburg-Hohenzollern rivalry over kleindeutsch vs. grossdeutsch national unification. So if they could have been similarly restrained toward France, and if the Germans had respected the results of the plebescite, the French might have gotten over the humiliation enough to coexist. It would have been a salve to French pride that the ethnically German A-L'ers chose to stay with France.

Alsace-Lorraine and the reparations were the main reasons the French were absolutely irreconcileable and spent the 1871-1914 years arming and forging alliances for the next fight against the Germans.
 
Iwould think something like this more likely if you had a Vienna led German Empire rather than Berlin...

which begs a question...
if the French Rev. had not occurred or had been more moderate resulting in a CM France...under the Bourbons how long would the Austro / French entente have lasted inthe 19th C.
 
Top