Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

Part VI: Dawn of a New Century
​

"...for all the tremendous change and upheaval seen in the 19th century, the 20th was only going to supercharge it; the revolution of industry, electricity, transport and communications in the preceding hundred years was but an appetizer for the incredible inventions, miracles and, yes, atrocities that mankind would release upon itself in the hundred years to come..."

- Understanding the 20th Century (Peking National University, 1999)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Edison Phonographic Company was by the early turn of the century a genuine monopoly on the recording business - thanks in large part to Edison's aggressive litigation around his patents - and the Orange, New Jersey "Edison Studio" just a short train ride from investors and other notables in New York served not only as a hub for making the recordings that make his name famous but also a center for experimentation of new auditory techniques. Perhaps also as importantly, the considerable profits from the studio and the phonograph factory next door helped underwrite all of Edison's other experiments in electrical engineering (a key component in the business, after all) and other forms of "productive media" that caught his fancy, as well as helping keep his the direct current based electric companies he still owned in the Confederacy afloat, with him stubbornly pouring money into the electrical systems for which he also held patents long after most in the Union and even many down south became convinced of the inferiority of that system..."

- An Age of Invention: The New Technologies that Shaped the Modern Century (1980)

(Author's note: I'm going to experiment with shedding the italics from here on out - hopefully that makes things a little easier to read? Thoughts?)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the date of January 8th, 1900 was no accident; it had been five years, precisely, since the attempted putsch against the Emperor by the Riograndense officers and his cousin. The ensuing years of peace had inured Pedro (and his government) to the threat of "the Clique" which still existed deep within the organs of the Army, even if much of its immediate leadership had been executed or exiled. His assassination by bomb, then, was a confluence of factors; of the still-thawing tensions between the palace and the Army and between Army and Navy, of the heightened levels of political violence ongoing in Brazil, and the rudimentary automobile technology of the time, as he was touring Rio de Janeiro with Infanta Sara Isabela in a custom-designed "motorcar" hand-built for him by the Peugeot company of France and the car backfired and broke an axle when the wheel went over the bomb thrown ahead of him and spooked his cavalry escort, making his escape impossible.

Brazil was immediately plunged into mourning and an aura of tragedy. Pedro's younger brother, Dom Luis, was immediately proclaimed Emperor by the Correia Cabinet lest the surprise bombing be followed by a putsch; the city was placed under martial law for precisely that fear. Coming on the heels of the provocative coup attempt five years earlier to the day - an unmistakable message - the assassination of Pedro III led to further purges of the military and empowered the monarchist landowners, industrialists and clergy tremendously; republicanism of any stripe was hounded from polite society, and even the Liberal Party, which was quite monarchist already, took a sharp turn towards reaction as the much more politically inclined Luis I took the throne. Brazil had gone from the disinterested Emperors Pedro II and his grandson to now a much more activist monarch, who had visions for his state as a regional and perhaps even global power and intended to see them through.

The tragedy struck home at the family, too. Dowager Isabel, in France at the time, did not speak to anyone for months, barricading herself at her apartment in Paris. O Preferido was stunned and saddened at his cousin's assassination; exile of the Isabelline branch had always been his aim, after all. But it was the widow who was destroyed worst. The death of her husband and infant daughter caused Empress Maria Annunciata to miscarry her child and nearly die herself in the process; after vacating the palace later in the year, she would return to Europe and spend the rest of her life in an Austrian convent, eventually becoming its abbess, visited first mainly by her uncle Emperor Franz Josef and his successor, her half-brother Emperor Franz Ferdinand (until his abdication and self-imposed exile) [1], as well as her other half-brothers and her younger sister, Elisabeth Amalie (who would predecease her by one year), until later in life, when her presence in Prague became a curiosity to much of European and Brazilian high society. She would die in relative anonymity in 1961, aged 85, and her brief, stern and cloistered time in Brazil was not much-mourned by the public there..."

- O Imperio do Futuro: The Rise of Brazil

[1] Spoilerrrrr

 

[KingSweden24]

"...that the Canal Commission returned a unanimous recommendation in favor of the Nicaragua route surprised nobody, least of all the dozen or so agents of the French Empire's military intelligence division (the Deuxieme Bureau) and secret representatives of the Tuileries-cozy Crédit Maritime bank who set about using cajolery, bribery, and even blackmail over the next year to attempt to derail the Senate's consideration of a formal treaty to build a canal along that route. The board of the Crédit Maritime, which had just reemerged from a decade-long malaise after the global financial crisis started on the Paris Bourse, was especially keen to kill "the American option" and make sure its investment in what was now the third iteration of the Panama Canal Company panned out. The Canal Commission Report, publicized in Washington in early February of 1900, made the Nicaraguan route not just a live possibility but seemingly an inevitability, unless the French Empire could defeat it - the future of its most prestigious bank, and securing not one but two of the world's trade chokepoints on behalf of the Marine Imperiale, depended upon it. They went to work quick, taking out anonymous advertisements in the papers of home states of potentially wavering Senators, financing a lurid public relations campaign against Nicaragua that focused heavily on its alleged volcanic activity and the depravity of its President Zelaya, and extorting a handful of Senators with knowledge of extramarital affairs or corruption which they threatened to leak to opposition press.

The agents of influence in America had an unlikely ally - Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who while not the Chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee (that distinction belonged to his friend, William Frye of Maine) was regarded as its most critical and influential member. Lodge had already made a name for himself in nearly a decade in the Senate for exercising robust Senatorial prerogatives and gleefully acting as a thorn in the side of first the Hay administration despite having once been friends with the late President and afterwards escalating his antagonism by emerging as the most aggressive proponent of naval expansion and imperialism in both the Atlantic and Pacific spheres, delaying the consideration of treaties, and demanding an effective veto on nearly every diplomatic and ministerial position that came before the committee on which he sat. [1] As negotiations began with the Zelaya administration of Nicaragua and President Rafael Castro of Costa Rica for a formal treaty now that it was plain the United States would go alone in securing a canal that it held primarily control over and that it could not nudge France out of isthmian Colombia, Lodge intervened, demanding that the Senate be allowed to shape the treaty and making plain to President Foraker that he intended to pursue the treaty's rejection as a matter of principal (despite supporting the Canal project personally) if it did not.

The French were amazed at Lodge's intransigence and could hardly believe their luck that one of the Senate's most die-hard imperialists could, potentially, be their greatest friend in torpedoing what would be a transformative legacy project for the United States, fellow Liberal Foraker in particular. Of course, that was because while they may have understood sex and money (they were French, after all), they had a poor understanding of the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party at the turn of the century and that much of Lodge's stubbornness was over a dispute for control of the party in this new age..."

- Bound for Bloodshed: The Road to the Great American War

[1] He was also, incidentally, a rabid nativist. Much of this type of behavior is lifted wholesale from the John Hay biography, where Lodge repeatedly shanked his former friends Hay and Roosevelt on the Panama treaties simply because he could, and of course he's quite famous for keeping the US out of the League of Nations IOTL. Lodge belongs high on the list of "worst Senators in US history," which is amazing considering how many of his peers and contemporaries in the Senate were literal ex-Confederate generals and white supremacists

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Foraker was constitutionally unable to avoid the fault line, though. Hay, as with all the remarkable luck he had had in his meteoric and mercurial political life, [1] had been blessed with two gifts in party management. The first, that in his patrician mores, charmed and bloodless rise to the top of American politics and esoteric literary intellectual interests, he cared little for the rough-and-tumble of internal Liberal politics and may even have regarded such as beneath him; as for the second, that he had comfortably had a foot both in the Ohio machine that he had helped build with his wife's family fortune and in "the Club," the New England Yankee aristocrats who really dominated the party. Foraker, however, had no such privileges; he had fought his way to the top of Ohio politics, no mean feat in its own, and now sat at the President's desk as the "White House," as it was in vogue to start calling the construction site on Pennsylvania Avenue, rose around him, a fresh and new building for a new century. He had driven from the field his intrastate enemies and the party in his home state was undeniably his; key allies of his "Cincinnati Boys" machine sat in the Senate, the Ohio Governor's mansion, and in his old friend William Taft even on the Supreme Court. Even more so than Illinois, it was Ohio that set the standard for Midwestern Liberals, and Foraker was their chieftain.

Of course, this mattered little east of the Hudson. Foraker had spent over five years as presiding officer of the Senate and new the intrigues of the Senate well, and the small clique of Yankees who ran it knew him well in turn; neither particularly cared for the other. The Club did not care for what they saw as uncouth machine bosses who were what they had formed the Liberal Party thirty years earlier to combat, rising out of the ashes of Salmon Chase's corrupt, patronage-driven Republican Party to pursue a new intellectual project. Never mind, of course, that New England was controlled just as much by a machine of their own making, perhaps one even worse than the urban ones; Liberal Caucus leader William Sprague IV effectively held the Rhode Island legislature as his private fiefdom to continue reelecting him (when he died in September of 1915 he would have served fifty-two-and-a-half years in the Senate continuously, a record of service that stands to today) [2], while Vermont's Redfield Proctor was the founder of a familial dynasty in the Green Mountain State that would make many Confederate, Mexican or Chinese political kingdoms blush. The Club sensed, actively, that it was losing its power; Sprague's leadership in the caucus was being questioned, it was taken for granted that former Senator George F. Hoar would not be asked to return as Secretary of State if the Liberals held the Presidency after November, Foraker had already helped push out Speaker Reed, a Mainer, and the administration in its eagerness to secure a Canal Treaty seemed keen to trod on coveted Senatorial privileges with the negotiations with Zelaya and Castro, circumventing both William Frye (also of Maine and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a rigid conservative both in politics and in deference to decorum) and, even worse, the boundlessly ambitious and easily offended Henry Cabot Lodge.

Lodge saw in the treaty negotiations an opportunity to remind Foraker that the Senate was an equal branch to the Presidency on foreign policy, though he did, in the end, want a canal secured. More importantly, though, he saw it as a method to outmaneuver his home-state rival - the earnestly idealistic Hoar, in charge of settling on an acceptable treaty, whose progressive nephew Sherman was serving concurrently in the Senate with Lodge and was a thorn in his side regarding control of their state party and the concomitant patronage. To kneecap and humiliate Hoar was to reestablish his dominance in Massachusetts, and it was an opportunity Lodge would not give up. Indeed, destroying Hoar's credibility with the Senate caucus could potentially also leave an opening for a new Secretary of State; if not Lodge himself, then perhaps elder statesman Frye, opening up the lucrative Chairmanship?

Foraker, for his part, was unamused. He had warned Hay repeatedly not to indulge Lodge over the years and had been frustrated that Lodge had nearly derailed the Spanish-American Reciprocity Treaty two years prior; that the Club's members (which included Hoar, whom Foraker did not particularly like - one rare thing besides a love for the Navy that he and Lodge had in common) seemed to care more about their personal home-state piques than a legacy-defining win for his Presidency and the Party ahead of what promised to be a tough election that fall, maddened a man who's life had been focused on delivering in the service of winning to no end..."

- The Aspirants: The Rise of the Liberal Party of the United States

[1] Besides, uh, that one thing at the very end
[2] This would beat out any OTL US Senator if we're just counting Senate service, btw. Yes, even the Robert Byrds and James Stennises of the world.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...1900 delivered more wins to the suffragettes of the United States as both Oregon and Montana passed bills expanding the franchise to women, and once again revealing the deeply polarized politics on the issue between state legislators of the West and of the East (and not just on the issue of suffrage - Oregon in the same year became the first state to pass strongly prohibitionist legislation while also mandating intraparty primaries for Senate candidates that the legislature would be bound by [1] and abolishing ward elections in Portland and Salem). Four states and three territories now allowed the women's vote for all elections, local, state or federal; the momentum seemed to be building to seek the big prize, the Western heavyweight of California, next.

The twin victories of 1900 and growing suffragette chapters on the East Coast (New York City's March for Suffrage would be larger than the previous year's by nearly 50%) overshadowed the fact that winning the franchise was as of yet still a campaign only tasting victory in the New World. In Europe, more conservative societies rigidly refused to countenance such a thing, even in local or indirect balloting; in the continent's largest democracy, the radicalism of Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain - who had delivered universal male suffrage just five years earlier - such a matter was dismissed out of hand. It was for that reason that while the suffrage movement was often fiery and fierce in the United States, it rarely if ever turned violent, compared to the rising number of bombings carried out by fringe suffragettes in London to bring attention to their cause..." [2]

- Suffragette Sisterhood

[1] So if a Democratic legislature is in office, they're bound by whoever won the Democratic primary contest, since the way I wove that into the narrative isn't super clear. They're not bound by a *statewide* choice independent of party; direct elections haven't quite gotten the push they need... yet.
[2] This is, believe it or not, true. The more mainstream women's rights orgs in the UK pushing for suffrage within the system were not amused.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...his personal fame and, by this point, fortune was too great for Westinghouse to realistically keep him, even with an offer of a substantial share of the company's stock and being firmly in the line of succession. Tesla politely declined; he had come to America as much for the opportunity as for the adventure, and in starting Tesla Electric Manufacturing Enterprises he was seeking both. He liquidated most of his already-considerable Westinghouse Company stock with his broker in New York in March of 1900 and set out into the west, like so many immigrants before him.

This, it may be said, was probably his first mistake as an independent businessman. [1] He arrived in Colorado Springs and established his laboratory there, hoping to use the peace and quiet it afforded him as well as ample land for his experiments. The trouble, of course, was that the nearest big city of Denver was no New York; his business was dependent on investors who were quite reluctant to journey all the way out to an isolated town off the Western Pacific mainline just to see whatever new innovation Tesla had cooked up. The Colorado sojourn would in the end be brief, yield few major breakthroughs, and ended when investors who controlled the majority of his firm began asking questions and he was compelled to return to New York..."

- Engines of Industry: The Capitalist Innovation of the Second Industrial Revolution

[1] Nikola Tesla - brilliant inventor, shit entrepreneur.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the new century brought with it a new paradigm in Mexican politics, and that was the exit of longstanding conservatives in good-standing who preceded Maximilian as national figures and could reasonably expected to have their own base of power independent of the Emperor. This suited Maximilian just fine; he had already begun dreaming of a more constitutionally sound system to build upon the reforms delivered by Zuloaga fifteen years earlier and with personalities like Miramon riding off into the sunset, he was ready to devolve more power to the Assembly away from the Chapultepec.

Of course, that manifested itself in curious way. Forty years of stability and institutional maturity within what could once reasonably be described as a rubber stamp council with too many members when the vote was always going to be "Si", had delivered an Assembly that was also much more sure of itself and its position in the Mexican system. Indeed, even Miramon - a living god to many Mexican conservatives, particularly in urban areas - had sparred with the landed wing of the Union Popular (that in his view was supposed to exist largely to further his ambitions, rather than the other way around) in his eight-year Premiership. So in a stroke of immense and in the end fateful irony Maximilian deciding to start the process of finding a new Prime Minister by consulting the Assembly, as was the fashion in constitutional monarchies, yielded a result that made him balk.

Miramon, despite not particularly liking Jose Yves Limantour, had endorsed the long-serving Finance Minister as his successor purely out of inertia and his competence. Maximilian quite liked Limantour for his part and was hoping that the Assembly was in-line with the departing Prime Minister and would tell the Chapultepec what he wanted to hear. He was shocked over a cool January lunch, then, when several key leaders of the UP - most importantly Enrique Creel, Pablo Macedo and Antonio Hernandez - informed him that the Assembly's preference was Joaquin Baranda, the Foreign Minister, or at least the Assembly's leadership.

In practice, there was not much difference between Limantour and Baranda. Both were conservative-liberal technocrats unfailingly loyal to the Empire, both were in good standing with the emerging urban bourgeois consensus, and both were well-regarded at their current ministries. What made Maximilian hesitate, however, was Baranda's well-known antipathy to the United States, which was a problem with the emerging economic and political ties between Mexico City and Washington. Baranda, like his ally Creel and many key landowners, held to a belief that the rapid and seemingly unstoppable rise of the United States would soon economically and in time culturally swamp the whole of the Americas and effectively vassalize Mexico; his geopolitical worldview instead endorsed a "Bloc of the South" that would partner with states such as Brazil, the Confederate States and Chile to check US ambitions as a unified group.

Maximilian rather feared that more belligerent members of this hypothetical Bloc Sud - namely, the Confederacy or Chile, both of which had fought wars with the United States more recently than Mexico had - would drag Mexico into a position of rivalry or aggression where instead his liberal instincts (and, it should be said, Amerophile admiration for capitalism, education and republican constitutional democracy) called for partnership. He politely thanked the Upistas for their thoughts and two days later went with his preference and called Limantour to the Chapultepec to be named Prime Minister. Maximilian, at least for the time being, was still more of a regular monarch than the constitutional kind..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

 

[KingSweden24]

This is a map I just threw together of the world as of 1900 in Cinco de Mayo. It's a bit sloppy but I rather like it personally. One can see the Confederacy on here, the colonies various European powers still hold, the Wanked Ottomans, German Luxembourg and French Alsace, as well as independent Madagascar and Cambodia.

I used the 1900 OTL base that @Crazy Boris made in the QBAM resource thread as my jumping off point.

The site wouldn't let me load anything bigger than this 0.25MB jpeg so sorry for the low quality.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...anything other than a rousing success. Min, for her part, took tremendous pride of the "Korean way," what she described to her close circle as a middle path between the breakneck Westernization of Japan in the Meiji Era and the fiercely conservative Qing Chinese reaction against the fairly modest Western reforms, much as Korea was in the middle between those two larger historical powers that had contested one another for influence on the peninsula.

With the old pro-Chinese conservative element largely broken over the last fifteen years, Kim Hong-jip was the ideal administrator for such a project; he was an admirer of the exiled Chinese intellectual Kang Youwei, who had tried but failed to marry Western concepts to Chinese society to reinvigorate the crumbling Empire, but what did not work in Peking could perhaps work in Seoul [1]. The process was distinctly of the Joseon civilization; on the one hand, the King Gojong began wearing Western-style military uniforms when in court and his advisers suits bought from American tailors, but they all still wore the traditional topknots. Lessons at the hundreds of schools and academies that sprung up across Korea were largely taught in native Korean and, for the first time, attempted to teach the Hangul script rather than the traditional Chinese Hanja. Unlike just over the Yalu, where missionaries and Christians were burned alive or crucified by the rampaging Boxer societies, religious tolerance was encouraged and demanded by Court, and only Catholic churches - invariably sponsored and staffed by French - gave sermons in anything other than Korean. Min, though remaining Buddhist, was particularly proud of the Hangul Bible she was given as a gift by her good friend, the American Methodist missionary and Ehwa's founder, Mary Scranton.

Americans were perhaps the foreigners who held the most prestige in Korea, and that was in large part because they meddled little in the kingdom's internal affairs despite leasing their key Asian naval harbor at Port Hamilton between the mainland and Jeju [2]. Merchants stayed mostly in the foreign legations of Inchon, Kaesong and Seoul, military advisers brought with them loads of Winchesters and Remingtons for the burgeoning Royal Korean Army to drill with, while missionaries became key parts of their communities. Russians, too, were held in good esteem, for similar reasons; provided Korea was nominally "neutral" and did not provide an avenue for any other power to threaten St. Petersburg's precious railroad concessions in Manchuria, and every winter allowed the Pacific Fleet to harbor in the mouth of the Taedong off Nampo while Vladivostok was frozen over, the Tsar and his ministers made no substantial demands, and the few Orthodox missionaries who did trek to the peninsula were rarely seen or thought of outside of Hamgyong Province. [3]

Koreans had thus long since forgotten the brief gunboat incident at Ganghwa Island with the Americans over thirty years prior; they had not, on the other hand, forgotten the various Japanese and French invasions or intrigues (most famously France's treatment of Korea as a mere additional theater in their war with China in 1884), or the fact that those two nations had carved out treaty ports which were effectively their exclaves in Wonsan and Pusan, respectively, and citizens of both enjoyed near-total extraterritorial rights throughout the peninsula, a privilege not shared by any other foreigner. Japan had long sought to bully Korea, continued to scheme against it and pro-Japanese instigators opposed to the royal couple such as Kim Ok-gyun remained in Tokyo, alongside republican revolutionaries in that same city who were in exile and inspired by the Han Chinese Tongmenhui that sought a progressive democratic republic in the place of the decaying Qing. France, for its part, still regarded Korea as a pseudo-protectorate and semi-vassal despite the changing circumstances on the ground there; the French, thus, were particularly disliked, despite Catholicism now being increasingly influential on the peninsula, particularly in Pyongyang, the so-called "Jerusalem of the Orient"..."

- Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century

[1] My Korean history is based entirely around Wiki-ing all these people I'm mentioning in said updates; if anyone knows when, precisely, did "Hanseong" become "Seoul," and why? Was it a Korean endeavor? How late did it carry the name Hanseong? I've been using Seoul since the 1860s but I wonder if that's correct.
[2] It kind of amazes how strategic Port Hamilton was at one point considered; those islands are tiny!
[3] Russian Orthodoxy of course had a pretty limited proselytizing component outside of formally Russian territories (and even then; see Central Asia). They didn't penetrate Alaska much either when it was theirs.

(All in all, Korea can be considered to be undergoing a "soft" or "partial" Meiji here; not nearly to Japan's extent, but much more so than even pre-Tiananmen Coup China and much more than what Korea did OTL. The French forced opening in 1869 and then the gradual withdrawal of Chinese/conservative influence and Min being able to pursue her preferred reforms without Japanese shenanigans puts the not-so-Hermit Kingdom in a substantively better position than they were comparatively in 1900 OTL)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...a project that did not obviously come easily. The "Mowat Majority" (a term coined by the precocious Prime Minister to avoid accusation that Laurier was the true power in government) had solved the Manitoba Schools Question with a workable compromise that settled all parties in the province [1], passed a law to end the badly malapportioned ridings throughout Canada once the 1901 census came about, and invested massively in the Permanent Active Militia's Royal Canadian Regiment, more than doubling its size, boosting the pay of its officers and enlisted men, and opening a small auxiliary staff school to avoid having to send staff officers to Sandhurst and allow their biannual education and cooperation on home soil. The Mowat government was also, compared to big-tent Liberal regimes in other Anglosphere countries such as the United States, fiercely federalist and emphasized her relations with the provincial governments. This was out of two reasons; the traditional Tory centralism that prioritized order and loyalty from Ottawa on down (what Laurier dismissively quipped as "the Great Orange Lodge of Ottawa"), and the resulting tensions between the government and Quebec in particular, but also the West. A federalist Canada, in the Mowat government's view, better aligned with the "peculiar needs" of the mosaic of communities within the state, and better served a national interest and their vision of a genuine Canadian nationhood.

Of course, Mowat and his ministry would soon be challenged not from within but from storm clouds over the Pacific; an international crisis that would raise questions about the role of Britain's Empire, and Canada's part to play within it..."

- Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions

[1] Same workaround Laurier found OTL, basically saying if enough French students warranted their own school in a community the government would pay for it, but not otherwise.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Boulanger made his impact known quick, in some ways more beneficial to the Tuileries than others. Even after barely over a year on the job, he was dominating the Cabinet like Bazaine was back from the dead, only he held a formal title with real constitutional power rather than just the vague, handshake carte blanche Napoleon IV had granted his father's old hatchet man and enforcer. Boulanger made his contempt for "subversion" known early with his enthusiastic endorsement of the Marquis de Galliffet, 69 years young upon his appointment, to be his successor as Minister of War and thus keeping the Army tightly in control of the ostensibly civilian ministry meant to control it. Galliffet, of course, was famed as the general who had led Marshal MacMahon's charge to crush the Commune 30 years prior, and earned the sobriquet Le Fusilier for his actions; regime skeptics in the Imperial Assembly were shocked that Napoleon IV did not push back more readily on the choice.

But the choice, in the end, was up to the Emperor still and not his mercurial Prime Minister, which Boulanger of course understood and in many ways readily accepted; boundlessly ambitious as he was, his loyalty first and foremost lay in the institution of the Crown and he in many ways viewed his own career advancement as a vessel for the defense of the monarchy, surmising that the Emperor twenty years his junior oft needed a "firm hand to steer the carriage as he waves to the masses." This attitude suggests why he accepted Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau as Foreign Minister in early 1900, shortly before the opening of the Paris Olympics, with little fuss, despite the latter's father having served as one of the fiercest republican opponents of the coup in 1848 that brought the Bonapartes back to power. Whatever his own misgivings of the Waldeck-Rousseaus (and there were many; Boulanger suspected his Foreign Minister of never truly having shed his republican sympathies, despite his now-lengthy career of conservative politics and moderate support for the regime) [1] Boulanger expressed them privately to the Emperor and that was the end of it, though he frequently boxed him out of key decisions and continued to act as a shadow chief diplomat in the vein of a Talleyrand, Metternich or Bismarck until Waldeck-Rousseau passed away in 1904. This accommodationist line was popular within a Cabinet that, to the surprise of many, lacked the gamesmanship its various peers had come to expect of the fiery Marshal, but alienated Boulanger from many of his longtime supporters within the Ligue des Patriotes, who wanted any sniff of republicanism driven out of the government entirely and for their champion to take a much more reactionary line, and indeed fringe figures within the Ligue began to push for a platform that divorced itself from the monarchist or republican question entirely to center itself entirely on French nationalist and Catholic chauvinism [2]..."

- The Revolution Sleeps

[1] My thinking here: whatever republicanism many Frenchmen would have held, a whole chunk of the Opportunists of OTL, especially the ones more to the right like Faure or Waldeck-Rousseau, probably would have been able to read the writing on the wall and just accept the liberal-conservative moderation of Nappy 4 and take his limited constitutional framework as a win and move on with their lives. People in politics are, inherently, pragmatic, even in a society as passionate about political minutiae as the French Third Republic of OTL
[2] Many of you will probably recognize the names that will appear when this starts to become important.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the new 20th century, to the average Briton on the street, represented new opportunity; an Empire at its zenith, with territories and interests on effectively every continent, the world's financial and scientific centrifuge and the sponsor of the greatest navy in the history of humanity. After the repeated foreign missteps of the Tory governments of the 1870s and the rise of France as a fierce competitor in Africa, the Near East and the Orient, Britannia had reestablished herself as a premier power under the muscular leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, who seemed charmed both domestically and internationally in near everything he touched and had stirred up a tremendous patriotic feeling of approaching a new era under the symbolic youthful, vigorous leadership of the handsome and virile (and universally popular) King George V. As always, it was the Royal Navy that led the way in military prestige, redoubling its command of the world's oceans and expanding its naval facilities in the Falklands, Aden and South Africa as well as signing an agreement with the friendly Madagascar Kingdom to station cruisers there for Indian Ocean patrols. British ships were not only numerically superior to every other European power but more technologically advanced, and the Senior Service was but a few years from debuting the HMS Dreadnought which would permanently revolutionize global sea power.

Under the surface, however, the sheen of British glory belied a number of challenges which Chamberlain's cocky posturing and demagogy could not easily make go away. [1] By the time Britain found herself on the brink of major crisis at the start of the 1900s, the ground had shifted enormously. While Europe had been remarkably stable since the back-to-back flareups of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 followed by the Spanish Insult that nearly triggered bloodshed in the Pyrenees the next year, overseas the British juggling act only seemed to be expanding. France of course had bedeviled London from the Suez to Formosa ever since their quick recovery from their surprise loss to Prussia in 1867; but the challenges had only grown from there. Now there was also a reinvigorated Russia to worry about, with the Bear extending her reach into northeastern China and her hot breath on the necks of the unpopular Shahs of Persia, both of which Britain desperately needed to keep within its sphere of influence. Britain's only saving grace was that France and Russia were cool towards one another over the China matter as well as Korea and Japan.

Beyond Asia and the critical trade routes, other considerations revealed themselves. The United States could no longer be regarded as a little Anglophone brother used as a bargaining chip; it was an emergent, continent-spanning industrial power in its own right, seeking to dominate its hemisphere the way Britain dominated its own, and using a robust naval force as the way to do it, to boot. Though flattered by imitation, the Union's ever-shifting electoral politics vexed British policymakers [2]; the one constant in nearly twenty years of American foreign policy had been the strong Anglophilia of statesmen such as John Hay or Thomas Bayard holding influence and power. In 1900 and beyond, however, that was no guarantee; the Liberals had either anti-imperialists who loathed Britain (such as Secretary of State George Hoar) or imperialists who viewed Britain as a potential competitor in Central and South America (such as President Joseph Foraker), and worse yet were the Democrats, who had been fierce Anglophobes for going on four decades and were even more reliant on the Irish vote than ever before. And Africa was perhaps the greatest challenge of them all, where Ripon had to puzzle out how to navigate defending British interests in the south and east of the continent, where independent states like the Free Republics or the Sultanate of Zanzibar fit into London's designs awkwardly..."


- Chessboard: The Splendid Isolation and British Foreign Policy

[1] This textbooks take on "the People's Joe" is, err, a bit different than the hagiography biography we've mainly seen as being the main source for his updates. Joe Chamberlain was a complex man, to say the least, and I can't say I particularly like or dislike him on net with all his eccentricities
[2] The irony for a country as perfidious as Britain is strong here to say the least

 

[KingSweden24]

"...no man perhaps better personified the rapid speed at which the Democratic Party revolutionized itself during the Liberal dynasty of the late 19th century than Justice Phelps [1], who died in March of 1900 at the age of 77. Son of a Whig Vermont Senator and an esteemed attorney, Phelps was an unrepentant Copperhead who even after the Treaty of Havana defended the Democratic response to the Confederate secession and expressed no qualms about opposing the abolitionists in his early political career, making him one of the most virulent white supremacists to sit on the Supreme Court in its history and certainly in the postbellum era. When appointed to the bench by President Thomas Hendricks [2], he was certainly on the most conservative flank of the Democratic Party but hardly out of its mainstream; upon his death, he seemed almost like an anachronism, with only gadflies such as Missouri Senator Francis Cockrell still aligning with his complete opposition to economic regulation of any kind and Phelp's vehement opposition to silver coinage a fringe point of view in a party ever-more reliant on the working classes of the West and finally beginning to chip away at the Populist onslaught on the Plains.

Phelps' death afforded Democrats something else - one of the party's most surprisingly unlikely allies in Nathan Goff, Jr., the surprise choice by the fairly pro-business President Foraker to take Phelps' place. In practical terms, Goff was a sensible choice; he was highly regarded in his role as Navy Secretary for most of the 1880s (and, with his elevation, made it three former colleagues who served together in the Blaine Cabinet to now sit on the bench at the same time over a decade later) [3] and had been even more respected as an even-handed judge on the Fourth Circuit Court. Liberals admired Goff's long career of public service and legal acumen, Populists were impressed by many of his rulings disfavoring corporations at the time when the American judiciary was possibly at its most deferential to industry, and Democrats liked the idea of a border state moderate replacing one of their own who threatened to stymie a number of reforms they would like to pass if and when they returned to the White House. In contrast to the fierce fight over Robert Lincoln's appointment, Goff only had one dissenting vote, though behind the scenes, the powerful Senate Judiciary Chair Redfield Proctor - who had replaced fellow Vermonter and Chief Justice George Edmunds in the Senate twenty years earlier and quietly worked hand in glove with Edmunds on matters of the judiciary - was deeply dismayed that little Vermont, previously home to two Justices, was losing such clout to West Virginia which did not even have a Liberal senator [4].

In the end, Goff's elevation proved an unexpected surprise - a few years later, it was often he, even moreso than his good friend William Howard Taft, who proved most amenable of all the Liberal-appointed Justices to the various reforms and progressive ambitions of the Hearst administration, despite very much being a political creature of a different time..."

- The Shadow of the Hickory Tree: The Reinvention of the Postbellum Democratic Party

[1] This guy
[2] How far we've come in the TL that this President seems like a distant memory to me!
[3] Goff, Lincoln, Peckham - plus Taft, who served as Solicitor General with them, too.
[4] This isn't seeding anything in the future, just more DC bs

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the French Orient was not just any colony; Paris's design upon it was to have it by to the French Empire what India was to the British, the crown jewel in its great expanse of global territories and a territory ripe for economic exploitation. The level of investment directed in that direction, then, was commensurate to that. One of France's advantages was its reliance on a robust local bureaucracy that was more tolerant of local norms than the one Britain had built from the ground up in the Raj; Chinese-style examinations were still carried out in both Hainan and Formosa, and the Nguyen Emperor in Annam and Tonkin still held considerable local control under the watchful eye of the Governor-General of French Indochina, whose seat was moved to Hanoi in 1900 to be closer to Kwangchouwan, Port-Napoleon and Kiungchow. [1] Machine parts assembled in France and exported helped drive an agricultural revolution with mechanized farming in the plantation-heavy economies of Cochinchina and Hainan, new factories were underwritten in the growing light industry of Tonkin and Formosa, and the tentacles of Credit Maritime seemed everywhere, leading some British officials to joke that the French had former their own East India Company, decades after such an endeavor was fruitful any longer. Indeed, the Golden Sail's offices were the financial and commercial centers of the French Orient; its office in Tai Pei, the capital of Formosa, was built in the style of a grand Chinese pagoda, while its Hanoi location took up three city blocks and was built in the noted French colonial style, both edifices lavish and broadcasting the tremendous power of France's leading financial institution overseas. [2]

France was hands-on with its colonies' cultural development, too. In Formosa, Hokkien Chinese was the co-official language alongside French, to set the island apart mentally and linguistically from more common Peking, Shanghai or Canton dialects of the language; in Hainan, an even more aggressive course of social engineering was pursued, with the indigenous Li people receiving the most choice bureaucratic positions and their language being raised to be co-official, to the point that Cantonese Chinese was discouraged in the dozens of schools established on the island by the eve of the Boxer War.

Furthermore, the French Orient became a sandbox for Catholic missionaries, indeed one of the most highly-preferred places for both lay organizations and clerics to proselytize. Catholicism long enjoyed a robust foothold in Korea, particularly in the Taedong Valley and Pusan, but there had to compete with not just the native Buddhism but Russian Orthodox and American Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, Anglicans and Presbyterians both for religious converts as well as the traditional position of the Church in education. In the more closed, captured societies of the French Orient, though, there was no such contest for the faith - unlike in France, where the government had to pay lip service to a large secular populace, the Church enjoyed free reign. By the early 1900s, after only fifteen years since the Treaty of Tientsin, Catholic institutions had monopolized elementary and secondary instruction in all four French colonies, and in 1899 the first university opened in Saigon (the Catholic University of Cochinchina) and a year later Formosa Apostolic University, also Church-run, opened near the grand construction site of the new Tai Pei Archdiocese and its accompanying cathedral.

The acquiescence of many locals was practical; relatively few Frenchmen resided in the Orient (compared to the much larger British population in the Raj) but a strict religious caste system mirrored on the Code de l'Indigenat in Algeria reigned: Christians at the top (in practical terms, just Roman Catholics, especially French ones), everybody else below. Catholicism was a ticket to success in French Oriental society, particularly in urban centers such as Saigon, Hanoi, or Tai Pei. Legally speaking, there were few substantive distinctions between white Catholics and Asian ones (culturally, there was a fair amount of discrimination) [3], which was also a large factor in a number of baptized Vietnamese, Hainanese and Formosan subjects making their way out of their homelands into the broader French Empire. The Marine Imperiale always needed sailors, the Foreign Legion always needed riflemen. French industry already attracted immigrants from Italy and Spain, as well as North Africa; before long, Franco-Oriental subjects joined them too on the Metropole's soil, where they found ethnic enclaves and communities in Paris, Marseille, Lille, Lyon and other great cities to give them a small slice of home. While Buddhist or local pagan women were dismissed as being good for little more than whorehouses in Saigon, Kiungchow or Kwangchouwan, Catholic women were brides for soldiers or lay missionaries after their time abroad who would return with them to France to give birth to the next generation. [4] In that sense, it was not entirely the economy that was exploited by Paris abroad - the people were used for France's national mission just as much..."

- The Scramble for Asia: Colonialism in the Far East in the 19th Century

[1] Modern day Qiongshan, the main city on Hainan
[2] Of course, the Banque de l'Indochine is still a thing; the Golden Sail is a global institution
[3] This has been a French thing for some time in OTL too; the tradition of the Foreign Legion is probably a big part, and Napoleon had black officers who fought for him.
[4] French natalist concerns are lessened by this phenomenon, to be sure.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the behavior of the Boxers across China, no longer just the North, was too much for foreign diplomats to bear anymore. Britain, as was her wont, went it alone, with Ambassador Claude Maxwell Macdonald personally protesting to Cixi and demanding the government not only defeat the roving bands that were currently harassing foreigners and Christians but to outlaw all secret societies "opposed to the interests of this government" wholesale. Other powers were less blunt; as the Boxer War broke out at the height of the Great Détente, France, Germany, Italy and Austria in fact signed a joint missive by all their foreign ministers and ambassadors in Peking requesting a response to the Boxer troubles, while the United States sent a more calmly-worded statement largely crafted by the State Department's legendary China hand William Rockhill, which Spain would eventually undersign as well. More soldiers were routed through the Taku Forts at the mouth of the Peiho and on the train from nearby Tientsin to Peking, to be stationed at the Legation Quarter - neither the first nor the last, and the troop presence in the capital was now plain enough to the average Chinese, and so resented, that it became impossible for the Court to take no action. It was Britain's belligerent tone, however, that stirred the pot and Cixi's response; "this government" was an unclear phrase to the Qing Court, open to interpretation, which Prince Duan and his hardliner faction took to mean Britain's government. The Foreign Office would, in later years, clarify that in Britain that the "Boxer Note" was always understood to mean China's government, and that Britain viewed the Boxer's as diametrically opposed to the interests of the Qing Dynasty's continuation. For want of a nail - on this confusion of word choice, of the definition of the word "this," China and the foreign powers would sink into a bloody, ugly war.

Rankled by what she took as disrespect, and having been egged on for months by Duan and his cronies, Cixi rejected both the Boxer Note and the Joint Missives and announced the tacit support for the Boxers, though not with any force of arms or even law... yet."

- The Last Days of the Qing Dynasty

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the strikes of the winter and spring of 1900 in Europe's mining regions was noteworthy not for what drove it - low pay, sordid conditions, the support and organizing of socialist-labor parties - but its coordination across a continent and various nations. Welsh colliers struck out alongside men in both German and Austrian Silesia, in the Ruhr, and in Wallonia. Of course, as always, it was in Belgium were such strikes turned the most violent; whereas the strikes ended with some conflict elsewhere, in Belgium the populace was once more treated to weeks of rioting, crackdowns and harsh penalties for the instigators. Class consciousness and solidarity in Europe, however, was starting to look pretty international..."

- Belgique Rouge

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Zanzibar's inability to control its continental hinterland had gone from a nuisance to an active problem for London; five times in 1899 and 1900, small contingents of the Indian Army had been sailed to Mombasa to carry out raids alongside Arab mercenaries to put down slavers and intransigent tribes. The situation was not helped by Portugal's waning influence in northeastern Austral-Africa, on both shores of Lake Malawi, which spilled over into the southern fringes of Zanzibari suzerainty, nor by the Belgian victories in the Congo Wars that had placed its soldiers astride the Great Lakes for the first time, and the signing of the Highland Kingdoms Treaties with Urundi, Rwanda, Unyoro and Toro, small kingdoms in the lands west and northwest of Lake Victoria and, critically, Britain's ally in the interior, Buganda. German colonial ambitions were similarly not limited to Kamerun or the South-West; expeditions across the dry interior highlands that were ambiguously claimed by both France and the Ottoman Empire to Kamerun's east, and then through the headwaters of the Nile in the swamps at the extreme southwest of Ethiopian dominion, led the 1898-99 Ziegler Expedition to the Great Lakes and suggested for the first time a potential German presence in East Africa. The next year, the German East African Company was chartered and established a small trading post on the northern bank of the Rovuma River's mouth; Zanzibar's claim that far south had long been unenforced and Portugal gladly (but informally) acquiesced to the German presence in what Berlin called Rovumastadt, glad for the opportunity to help secure the northernmost territories of their massive but sparsely patrolled African dominion, particularly the remote Rovumaland.

The plain crumbling of Zanzibari authority threatened one of the key planks of British African policy, which was the denial of access to Indian Ocean territory of anyone other than themselves, but especially Belgium and by proxy France. The key, first and foremost, was making sure the Highland Kingdoms Treaties did not threaten their position in the northern Great Lakes, and so the Uganda Act began to be debated in Parliament - the formal invasion, seizure and annexation as a Crown Colony the territory between Mombasa and the Great Lakes and the formalization of the "Uganda Protectorate" further into the interior. European diplomats reacted with alarm at its introduction and Zanzibar was furious, lodging a formal complaint and starting anti-British riots on the islands; the Act divided Cabinet, too, with both Foreign Secretary Lord Ripon and Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Dilke skeptical of its utility and the strategic value of Uganda vs Prime Minister Chamberlain and Colonial Secretary Trevelyan, who were both in support. Whatever the Uganda Act's merits, and the considerable lobbying by the Admiralty and an increasingly imperialist public to pursue it at once, the East African Question was quickly but on ice for a few years after a massive crisis erupted elsewhere in the world that would require British attention instead..."

- The African Game: The European Contest for the Dark Continent

 

[KingSweden24]

"...a pregnant Maria Carlota's visit to Mexico with her husband, Dom Afonso of Portugal (the younger brother of King Carlos I), and their first child, Infante Luis Afonso, offered Margarita an opportunity to really catch up on the goings-on in European courts, directly from one of its sources. Afonso, as was the bon-vivant's wont, was more interested in regaling her husband and father-in-law with stories of his time as Viceroy of Portuguese India, on hunts from elephant-back and the various world-travels he had experienced before and after (the marriage to Maria Carlota famously being delayed for his tour in Goa). The Dom was immediately smitten with Mexico, to the extent that he would make a point to travel there nearly every year with his wife, which Maria Carlota certainly did not mind, much as she loved the more low-key life offered to a second-tier royal with his own military career and interests in Portugal as opposed to the stifling court life of a royal consort or heir. Their 1900 stay was long enough that the Imperial family was able to welcome Maria Carlota's second son Infante Maximiliano Felipe into the world in Mexico, only a few months before Margarita gave birth to Agustin Salvador, her fifth child and the fourth who would live to adulthood. The two cousins would be close for all of their lives together, until Prince Agustin's untimely drowning death in a sailing accident in 1933. As for Margarita, the visit was not just an opportunity to reconnect with her beloved Maria Carlota but also a reassurance that "Mexican matches" were viable in Europe for her own future children, and that her sister-in-law had not only been accepted but embraced by a royal family and court in the stodgy Old World..."

- The Matriach: Empress Margarita Clementina and the Emergence of a Modern Mexico

(Shout out to @Curtain Jerker for his help in making this update happen)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Brussels had, three years earlier, also staged the Olympiad in connection with its Universal Exposition, but of course France was a whole different beast than little Belgium, and was able to not only put much more resources into both but correct for what were largely seen as the mistakes of the Brussels Games, namely that the Exposition greatly overshadowed the Games compared to the events in Athens three years before. Paris in 1900 would be the third Games on the three-year cycle that would end by mid-decade, but the organizers, Coubertin in particular, were adamant they would not allow another Exposition to overshadow their athletic contest. For their own part, Emperor Napoleon IV and his government - led by the fiercely proud nationalist Georges Boulanger - were seeking to jumpstart French public consciousness with another successful Exposition on the level of that held 11 years prior that was regarded as one of the greatest in history, and structured the program so that major events, congresses, shows and exhibits would occur at or after the close of the Games, tiering and staggering the Exposition throughout the year and summer more strategically. The Games, for its part, was a financial success, and also succeeded in its endeavor of being a celebration of French nationalism; organizers who had previously been tempted to return the Games to Athens permanently as had been floated not only in '94 but in the aftermath of the mediocre Brussels Games were relieved that the Games came out in the black and then some, and that it was so easy for athletes to journey and find accommodations, reflecting just as well on French stewards as the medal table, dominated by French athletes, did. The Summer Olympics had, for lack of a better word, been saved..."

- States at Play: The Geopolitics of Sport