AHC: Holy Alliance-->Absolutist Dark EU

MerryPrankster

Challenge: Make it so the Holy Alliance of the post-Napoleonic era transforms into a reactionary pan-European entity intent on preserving monarchical power, aristocratic privilege, etc. against revolutionaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Alliance

There'd be French troops policing Germany, German troops policing Spain, etc. to suppress any risings against the kings.

Bonus points if national identity fades totally into social class and we get a pan-European aristocratic consciousness crossing national boundaries. I think that would require more integration of the Old Regime states than just "all of us will help the other against revolutionaries."
 

I Blame Communism

Banned
You probably need to detach Britain, since we were too far gone already in terms of industrial development: if the landed classes had staged a last stand, they'd surely have lost.

So: William IV dies in Flanders in 1813, Ernest Augustus is horrible, confrontation over Catholic Emancipation or something, stones thrown at the army, one thing leads to another, Commonwealth of Great Britain and Ireland declared, 1832.

Meanwhile, somehow replace the pig-headed Charles X in France with somebody of Bismarckian sublety and Metternichian pragmatism, so that as of the British revolution there's been no French one. If we could suppress or avoid revolutions in Belgium and Greece as well it would set the best precedent.

So, House of Hanover flee to, ah, Hanover. The appearence of a revolutionary power which, in spite of its initial bourgeois respectability, is both significant and impossible to crush focuses the minds of reactionaries. With nobody inclined to mind what Britain thinks, can Austria, France, and Russia bash out a mutually agreeable brutalisation of the Ottomans? Austro-French concensus that Italy is a geographical expression, at any rate (which returned for a while after 1861, interestingly enough).

So, there's a way to keep the Holly Alliance somewhat functional for a bit longer than IOTL: it's a start. Proper union, now...

The union of the France-Germany-Italy-Benelux-Hapsburgia area in an economic and political bloc was being projected - by the Germans, the Germans, and the Germans, but still - from the latter part of the 19th century so it's not entirely outlandish. In the long-term it would probably help to dislodge Russia at about the time Britain's industrial lead is slacking, but for now, perhaps another common threat can be furnished by the United States? Some sort of disastrous endeavour lying between the final Spanish expeditions and Louis Napoleon's Mexican adventure?

And then the arrival, and defeat, of the revolution, and a further drawing together in solidarity. Some chain of affairs in Germany prevents Prussia having any second thoughts about the Austro-French hegemony. I don't even know what happens to Russia.

Now, the society of divinely-sanctioned hierarchy and the Vile Multitude not having any opinions cannot last long in an industrial world, but could a whole team of *Bismarcks and *Bachs and *Alexander III's arise, determined to modernise without giving an inch to the modernisers?

Meanwhile all the various *Marxes, *Kossuths, and *Garibaldis are gathered in the fog of London, and find themselves with a lot of government money at their disposal.
 
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MerryPrankster

Britain was relatively free even before the French Revolution, so I really doubt they'd go for this.

But Absolutist France crushed the revolt in Spain and Nicholas I was the Gendarme of Europe, so I could easily imagine all of them combining.

Perhaps the 1830 French revolt that unseated the restored Bourbons is crushed by German and Austrian soldiers?
 
black angel

black angel

I Blame Communism said:
You probably need to detach Britain, since we were too far gone already in terms of industrial development: if the landed classes had staged a last stand, they'd surely have lost.
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I don't know about that, the Brits were in 1815 freer than Russia but thats a low bar to Jump, it was a country however run by a Monarchy, a House of Nobles, and a corrupt body of "elected" members of the highest of the upper-class and the sons of Nobles cutting their teeth in Commons before coming into Lords, with repressive laws against Catholics still in place, I can see PM Duke of Wellington siding with such a dark EU to fight what Troys see as "radical Republicanism"
 

I Blame Communism

Banned
black angel said:
I don't know about that, the Brits were in 1815 freer than Russia but thats a low bar to Jump, it was a country however run by a Monarchy, a House of Nobles, and a corrupt body of "elected" members of the highest of the upper-class and the sons of Nobles cutting their teeth in Commons before coming into Lords, with repressive laws against Catholics still in place, I can see PM Duke of Wellington siding with such a dark EU to fight what Troys see as "radical Republicanism"
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Yes, but he'd lose. There was a very serious scare about this in 1832: if a less sensible and more objectionable monarch had decided to fight the attempt of the upper-middle-classes to get a stake in the system rather than actively helping bludgeon the reactionaries into submission, it could easily have gotten out of control. Conspiracies - for instance to create a run on the bank - circulated among the bourgeois liberals, and Britain was not a particular stranger to political violence in the era of Captain Swing.

The same thing happened in France in 1830. In France the combination of aristocrats with peasants that was the final support of reaction had been disrupted by the getting rid of aristocrats as an economic category; Britain had done the same thing with peasants, except in the Highlands.

As in France, any combination of the wide-eyed radicals with the Unwashed Masses in the cities would be promptly shot to bits by the new Establishment, but then I'm not so sure this would happen immediately in Britain given that we would be learners in the whole tradition of violent republicanism. British radicals had generally retreated from violencem especially in area (like Scotland) where they'd tried it and seen how well it worked.
 

I Blame Communism

Banned
MerryPrankster said:
Britain was relatively free even before the French Revolution, so I really doubt they'd go for this.
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Relatively rowdy, at any rate, although IIRC the British electorate and the French aristocracy were similar in size relative to the population. :p That's why I go for a British revolution, in order to draw a clearer boundary between Britain and European Civilisation. IOTL, Britain was too structurally different to be either really revolutionary or really reactionary. Two famous Germans of '48 took shelter in Britain: Klemens von Metternich and Friedrich Engels.

Since Britain indeed meshes poorly with the others, better to seperate it unequivocally.

MerryPrankster said:
But Absolutist France crushed the revolt in Spain and Nicholas I was the Gendarme of Europe, so I could easily imagine all of them combining.
Click to expand...

They did manage to combine for a while - in 1848 you still got a small-scale re-enactment of the late Napoleonic Wars when the aristocratic hierarchy was once again rescued by Russian peasants in greatcoats, which probably goes to show something. The two problems to overcome are the different rates of industrial capitalist development putting them into a situation where you can no longer pretend the people don't have any politics at different times, and the impulse to power-rivalry. Both of these are reasons why I think sooner or later you have to ditch the most reactionary power of all in Russia, or else you get not a dark EU but some sort of ironically reversed Warsaw Pact east of the Elbe.

MerryPrankster said:
Perhaps the 1830 French revolt that unseated the restored Bourbons is crushed by German and Austrian soldiers?
Click to expand...

A revolution in France that wasn't an existential threat to monarchies and didn't provoke general war was partly cause and partly symptom: better, I think, to avoid such a revolution and indeed any revolution that can't make some show of building a republic on the ruin of all princes.
 
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