DB challenge: Republican France

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to make present-day France a republic with a POD after the crowning of Napoleon III.
 
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to make present-day France a republic with a POD after the crowning of Napoleon III.

I'm sorry, but it's not a challenge, it's a reality...

Of course, you have the III Republic, the IV Republic and the V Republic and "L'Etat Français" in 1940-1942.

EDIT : OK, I'm sorry, I'm a newbie,

But if a DB thread is the same thing that a DBWI thread. DBWI is more clearier.
 
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I'm sorry, but it's not a challenge, it's a reality...

Of course, you have the III Republic, the IV Republic and the V Republic and "L'Etat Français" in 1940-1942.
"DB" means "Double Blind" -- it denotes a roleplay thread where we pretend to be from an alternate timeline speculating whether something which actually happened in OTL was plausible or not. So in this thread we'd be roleplaying as people from a TL where France never went republican again after Napoleon III -- and in referencing our own ATL "history" we build a monarchist-France TL from scratch. DB threads can be quite fun when done properly; they can also be really annoying when people don't take them seriously or don't pay attention to what someone's said before.

You're new, so I'll cut you some slack for not knowing AH.com terminology like "DB".

Incidentally, to everyone else -- don't let these two posts kill this DB off. It looks like a good one.
 
OOC: By DB challenge he means a double-blind challenge like a DBWI. Presumably France is still an empire in this timeline after a Franco-Prussian War that goes differently. So we need to figure out a way in this timeline to make this Imperial France become a Republic. [Edit: beat me to it]

IC: Eh, this is kind of hard. Napoleon III was a fairly popular leader, especially once he liberalized towards the end of his reign. Then again he wasn't particularly unpopular to begin with (he did after all successfully launch a coup against himself and his government). Maybe if he botches the Franco-Austrian War / 2nd War of Italian Independence his reign won't last beyond his earlier more conservative (and more unpopular) years. Honestly I'm not too good with 19th century France. The victories of 20th century France are much more impressive.
 
If France had lost the First Great War against Prussia and Austria, then it might have gone republican. After that, the monarchy was too entrenched anyone to dislodge it. Besides, the European theatre of the 2nd Great War was too one sided to threaten France.
 
IC: Eh, this is kind of hard. Napoleon III was a fairly popular leader, especially once he liberalized towards the end of his reign. Then again he wasn't particularly unpopular to begin with (he did after all successfully launch a coup against himself and his government). Maybe if he botches the Franco-Austrian War / 2nd War of Italian Independence his reign won't last his beyond his earlier more conservative (and more unpopular) years. Honestly I'm not too good with 19th century France. The victories of 20th century France are much more impressive.

Even with Napoleon III overthrown - and there are a number of occasions on which he took great risks, such as enthroning Murat in Naples or his Algerian policy - a republic would IMO only arise out of either the inability of both Legimists and Orleanists to impose their candidate (and I would expect such a republic not to last for very long) or a socialist revolution.
 
If France had lost the First Great War against Prussia and Austria, then it might have gone republican. After that, the monarchy was too entrenched anyone to dislodge it. Besides, the European theatre of the 2nd Great War was too one sided to threaten France.

OOC : OK, I'm try to play... It's already difficult because the last two post are a little bit diverging...

By saying monarchy, I think you are saying the Imperial monarchy. In fact, French don't like the Empire of the French to be classified as others smaller and figure-like monarchies where the Head of State have only a symbolic rule.

Even if France is a constitutional monarchy, the Bonaparte rulers always have a lot of power. Their power can be compared to the power of the POTUS for our friends from across the Atlantic...

When the Empire win the First Great War against Prussia and Austria, it had already win the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and the big northern german union have already been dismantled. It was already too late in 1872, for the republican opposition, when Napoleon III became the great man in Europe who succeed to maintain the status-quo of european peace after stopping the military expansion of Prussia who want to unit Germany by "blood and iron".

Probably the greatest mastertroke of Napoleon IV was to buy russian alliance during the First Great War with polish territories from Prussia and Austria and the creation of the Kingdom of Poland with the second Romanov dynasty... He was probably the best diplomat of the Bonaparte dynasty by keeping both good relations with the UK and Russia.
 
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