Chicken Supprime: a different 1789

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]19: France, 1798 - 1803[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]For most of his first year of adulthood, Louis XVII took no more part in affairs than he had in his minority. He was busy though, and not just with his education: the triumvirate who were running the country were firmly protectionist [1], and the king was swiftly coming to the conclusion that he did not share their values. Outside the rarefied air of the élite, his enlightened sympathies were not uncommon; indeed, even within his own family the Duke of Orléans openly supported the progressives of Paris. Louis had no difficulty making contact with those within Versailles who would support a palace coup, and all the while his uncles and mother carried on running the country as if they were monarch, convinced the boy was still their pawn, oblivious to his plans.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Louis was content to bide his time, but his supporters were more impatient, and urged him to make a move. First, in early 1799, the counts of Provence and Artois were persuaded that the king's mother was the focus and perhaps cause of popular resentment against the régime, and therefore it might be wise for her to retire. Marie Antoinette was prepared to yield her position, but less happy about abandoning her son; only after a private meeting with the king did she withdraw permanently to Saint-Cloud.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]With one leg of the tripod gone, Louis's uncles quickly found their mutual disagreements becoming unbearable; this was no accident, as they were being separately fed rumours and misinformation about the other's plans. Finally, in July 1799, the king stepped in and took formal control of the government, dismissing Provence and Artois. He quickly brought in a new ministry of his friends and supporters, including his tutor Lacanal, the Duke of Orléans, visionaries like Barnave and Pétion de Villeneuve and pragmatists like Tilly and the Archbishop of Sens; a varied range of big names among the leading lights of the progressive élite, and a coalition that could not endure forever, but in four years it made a clear impact [2].[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Reforms followed quickly as long-cherished projects were put into place. A new series of Écoles royales was founded in Paris, to train engineers and scientifics; the système universel, devised in the Académie royale des sciences at the start of the decade, was brought into official use, although it would take some time to displace customary units in everyday use; a Banque de France, inspired by its English rival, was established. The reforms were not always populist: with the new politicians being predominantly urban, policies that were ideologically sound but could engender unrest in the countryside were adopted, particularly enclosure and a move to enforce more productive crop rotation systems. This did lead to sporadic resistance in some rural areas, but with the full support of the king and the regional Assemblées the unhappy peasants had no hope of success, as long-standing feudal rights were torn up in the name of greater efficacity [3].[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]In Paris, the Marquis de la Fayette, restored to his position overseeing the security of the city after returning from the war, was authorised to carry out a major reform of its military capacities. The École Royale Militaire was reopened, and a new barrack complex across the Seine at the opposite end of the Champ de Mars was built, beside the village of Chaillot; billets closer to the city were then closed. The number of soldiers near Paris was thereby increased, but their visibility to the citizens was reduced: La Fayette's aim was that the army's presence should serve as a deterrent and a safeguard, but not a provocation.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]One reform dear to the king's more idealistic instincts that he found difficult to implement was the abolition of slave trafficking, in line with France's commitments under the Treaty of Lisbon. There were many within France who profited directly from the trade, and the revenues from slave-dependent sugar filled the royal coffers. Even Louis's famed stubbornness was challenged by the vested interests that tried to inveigle him; it would not be until 1803 that the trade in slaves would be suppressed, and only then because a source of finance for merchants' compensation had been found.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Saint-Domingue was a source of great wealth for the kingdom, but it depended for its profitability on a regular supply of new slaves. Even before the great revolt of the 1790s, mortality rates had exceeded birth rates among the enslaved population, and the tremendous loss of life during the revolt required still more imports to bring the plantations back to full efficacity. Without the slave trade, Saint-Domingue would become a drain on royal resources, as the improvements required for the slave population to be self-sustaining would wipe out the sugar profits.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]A potential solution was suggested by a Dominguois representation as early as 1800, but it took two years for it to be seriously explored, and another twelve months of transoceanic negotiations until agreement could be made: in April 1803, Louis formally accepted an offer from the American representative Edward Telfair to purchase the colony of Saint-Domingue for the United States for $12 million (about 60 million livres tournois). It would take the rest of the year for the agreement to be ratified in the United States, but on 20 December in a short ceremony at Cap-François the colony became officially an American territory. As a sweetener, the French included in the sale two of their older ships of the line that were due to be decommissioned, the Marsellois and the Guerrier, officially with a view to ensuring the French withdrawal would not lead to increased pirate activity, but in reality aimed at building up the American navy as a potential counterweight to the British.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]1803 was also the year Louis's first government began falling apart. The problem was not the breadth of opinions among the ministers – although disagreements had been common from the beginning – but Louis himself: like many an idealistic youth, his positions had never been entirely coherent, and eventually the contradictions became too much.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Louis's faith had been perhaps the key motivation for his drive to improve his subjects' lot, as well as for his desire to end France's slave trading, but ultimately it was also Louis's faith that caused him to pull back from the progressive cause. A series of meetings with Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld in summer 1803 seems to have convinced the king that much of the progressive movement with which he had aligned himself was driven by irreligion or even atheism, and further travel along the liberal road risked the moral wellbeing of the French people.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Rochefoucauld had a point: Barnave and, ironically, Talleyrand had both gone rather too far in expressing hostility to the power of the church in France, and both were dismissed, to be replaced by more protectionist figures. Regressive opinion in France was still appalled by the régime's direction, but progressives too were now disillusioned; the resignations of Pétion and his Flemish acolyte Fleuriot-Lescot on 17 October 1803 are traditionally seen as the end of Louis XVII's reform era.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif][1] I've tried to be careful (more careful than in previous posts) to avoid post-POD neologisms unless they are the most natural coinages. Hopefully the meaning of words should be obvious from the context; in this case, 'protectionist' is equivalent to what we would call 'conservative'.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif][2] i.e. the people OTL knows as Joseph Lakanal, Philippe Égalité, Antoine Barnave, Jérôme Pétion, Alexandre de Tilly and the Archbishop of Sens is Talleyrand. By 'visionary' is meant 'idealist'; 'pragmatist' was coined OTL in the late 19th century, but seems natural.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif][3] 'Efficacity'? That would be 'productivity'. Good grief, it's irritating how many words were coined in the 19th century.[/FONT]
 
Ah, so this is still going :)

I can't help but think France could become much more like Britain following a set of reforms half-enacted by a capricious teenaged autocrat - a hodge-podge of some new ideas mixed with other old guard ones, tenaciously clinging on.

That suddenly made me wonder if Britain and France could become cordial a little earlier than OTL, or if they could be divided by their greater similarity and remain enemies even longer? It's also a shame to see *Tallyrand sidelined, but he still has time to come back into the inner circle and play a part in how Europe's borders shift in the years to come.
 
Ah, so this is still going :)

But of course, it's just a case of getting round to writing things. And having an internet connection that isn't irritatingly temperamental.

I can't help but think France could become much more like Britain following a set of reforms half-enacted by a capricious teenaged autocrat - a hodge-podge of some new ideas mixed with other old guard ones, tenaciously clinging on.

There is little remarkable about a half-reformed semi-constitutional monarchy in this world; the lack of revolution means the old régimes are not swept away by the tide of republican and imperial French, and reformist/liberal ideas are not discredited as worthwhile endeavours for monarchs who want to keep their heads. Hungary and Milan may give some pause for thought, but as they are not exporting their revolutions quite so directly as the French did it's easier to ignore them. The old problem of residual feudal corporate diets just not cutting it anymore in an era of greater effective central control remains, so not reforming is perceived as a greater risk to the throne than implementing a few tame, populist reforms.

That suddenly made me wonder if Britain and France could become cordial a little earlier than OTL, or if they could be divided by their greater similarity and remain enemies even longer? It's also a shame to see *Tallyrand sidelined, but he still has time to come back into the inner circle and play a part in how Europe's borders shift in the years to come.

I doubt it, unless and until their common interests converge sufficiently. France still covets similar parts of the world to Great Britain: India for instance is still being used by both, and despite the withdrawal from Saint-Domingue, France still wants to challenge British power in the western hemisphere, if only by cultivating the United States.

Régimes may come and régimes may go, but Talleyrand remains: he won't be out of favour too long, and who knows, maybe he'll get a nice diplomatic post to get him away from the Métropole?
 
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Reforms followed quickly as long-cherished projects were put into place. A new series of Écoles royales was founded in Paris, to train engineers and scientifics; the système universel, devised in the Académie royale des sciences at the start of the decade, was brought into official use, although it would take some time to displace customary units in everyday use; a Banque de France, inspired by its English rival, was established. The reforms were not always populist: with the new politicians being predominantly urban, policies that were ideologically sound but could engender unrest in the countryside were adopted, particularly enclosure and a move to enforce more productive crop rotation systems. This did lead to sporadic resistance in some rural areas, but with the full support of the king and the regional Assemblées the unhappy peasants had no hope of success, as long-standing feudal rights were torn up in the name of greater efficacity [3].[/FONT]

2 comments.

1) Your SU sounds like it's an early version / equivalent of SI=metric. However, without the wholesale revolution of the OTL French Revolution, I doubt you could get ANYTHING like the metric system. Or were you just talking about a standardized nation system of archaic weights and measures, slightly cleaned up, like the British did?

2) Banque de France. Do you realize that the 'Bank of England' at that time period was far more like the Bank of the US (i.e. a commercial bank that made commercial loans, but also did national governmental work on the side) than the modern Bank of England. Note that the "Royal Bank of Scotland" is essentially commercial even today.
 
2 comments.

1) Your SU sounds like it's an early version / equivalent of SI=metric. However, without the wholesale revolution of the OTL French Revolution, I doubt you could get ANYTHING like the metric system. Or were you just talking about a standardized nation system of archaic weights and measures, slightly cleaned up, like the British did?

2) Banque de France. Do you realize that the 'Bank of England' at that time period was far more like the Bank of the US (i.e. a commercial bank that made commercial loans, but also did national governmental work on the side) than the modern Bank of England. Note that the "Royal Bank of Scotland" is essentially commercial even today.

Thanks for the comments.

1) The SU is very close to early metric, which had roots stretching well back before the revolution. It's not an attempt at decimalising everything like OTL's time nonsense, it's just the basic mètres, graves (kilogrammes) and pintes (litres); as in the case of pintes, there is a partial attempt to co-opt the names of old units (e.g. the pied will still exist, and be defined as thirty centimètres, the pouce as three centimètres), so it could be viewed as a standardisation of the old confusion within a decimal framework, but it will be only the names surviving: the old relations between the units are lost (e.g. the old pied was twelve pouces, the new one is ten).

The idea of a standardised decimal system was not new at the Revolution; there had been demands in the cahiers de doléances for standardisation, and the definition of the mètre goes back to the work of the 17th century Italian polymath Burattini (viz. the length of a pendulum with a one-second period at 45° of latitude). Further, it was in the national government's interest to reduce the potential for exploitation, fraud and error from the rambling and inconsistent system of customary units.

2) As for the Banque de France: I'm not familiar with the American banking system, so I can't compare, but the function of the Bank of England that the French are trying to replicate is a stable manager of the national debt in which other private investors and banks can have confidence. After the failure of John Law's bank it's understandable that the French should be wary of such a thing, but the new bank is a lot more careful than Law's about holding on to enough gold to pay its depositors and not investing all its money in New World swamps.

Also, like the (contemporary) Bank of England and OTL Banque de France but unlike Law's bank, this BdF is properly independent of the state, and indeed as a confidence-building exercise many of the king's ministers and supporters are among the original subscribers.
 
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