Dulce Et Decorum Est - General Dumouriez' France

Other questions- who was Desiree Hamelin OTL
Of interest. I scrambled the name, but that's the source. Napoleon knew her, apparently.
and what happened to the Dutch East Indies, South Africa, Suriname, and elsewhere (are they also British)? The British could end up controlling two of the richest territories in the Indian Ocean, and more importantly have naval control of the oceans there- it might be harder for other powers to get into Indochina if the British have influence pressing from both Bengal and Indonesia...
All coming up! Yep, Britain's just been handed a delicious imperial platter ...
 
January 8th, 1797 – Selim III summons French and Austrian officers to Constantinople to assist with the drilling of recruits to the nizam-i jedid, a new infantry corps comprised entirely of Turkish peasants. The Sultan’s commitments to the force incur the wrath of the Janissaries, the traditional military elite, who have standing grievances regarding his progressive administrative attitudes and partiality to good relations with the Western powers.

January 25th, 1797 – With its defenders in desperate flight down the coast to reinforce Tehran, the port-city of Raŝt – “jewel of Ancient Xerxes’ [the Caspian] sea”, in the words of court poet Gavrila Derzhavin – falls to the Russian armies. Despite Zubov’s later musings upon a quixotic descent into a metropolis of startling wealth and splendour, his troops actually rode into a decimated town populated by vagrants and clansmen, stripped of the virtual entirety of its former magnificence amid the chaos that followed the Persians’ withdrawal. Its capture was, nevertheless, a strategic and political triumph.

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British ships make land at Cape Colony.

February 2nd, 1797 – The Cape of Good Hope Incident. In response to raids by Dutch privateers on merchant shipping in the South Atlantic, a British fleet under Vice Admiral George Vandeput comes ashore at Cape Town. After a brief engagement with the local garrison, troops detain Governor Abraham Josias Sluysken; he is forced to sign over the South African colony to Jan van Citters, an Orangist exile from a petty-aristocratic family. Hosted lavishly in London, Jan dully presents documents to the War Office transferring sovereignty to the British crown, guaranteeing the first seizure by the United Kingdom of Batavian overseas assets.

February 11th, 1797 – Austrian physician Heinrich Lehner publishes his Fourteen Studies in Human Body Analytic in German. Informed greatly by the work of Scottish practitioner John Hunter (Lehner was said to have taught himself English for the digestion of Hunter’s Treatise on the Venereal Disease), the dissertation carries several landmark propositions, including a detailed consideration of the symptoms and causes of tuberculosis.

February 31st, 1797 – Gilbert Beaufranchet, the republican mayor of Nantes, is dragged up dead from a well, his body vigorously mutilated. The Executive quickly attributes the killing to Montagnards, despite the void of radical presence in the city.

March 4th, 1797 – Thomas Jefferson is sworn in as the second President of the United States. In an incident once dismissed as partisan Federalist hoopla, but later corroborated with reference to official records, one of Jefferson’s first acts of office is to arrange for the dispatch of a consular function to Paris.

March 17th, 1797 – Bloody Friday. A Spanish contingent transporting General José de Urrutia up the Missouri River is set upon by bayonet-wielding supporters of the All-Catholic Commons League. 33 members of the band, including the General, are slain; survivors report that the assailants had disguised themselves as a brotherhood of priests. de Urrutia, a veteran of the war against France, had been posted to Louisiana to oversee the orderly operation of the district, in the wake of burdensome tax increases and domestic upheaval in Spain.

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Dutch military planners convene for war proceedings.

April 2nd, 1797 – The National Commission of the Batavian Republic votes to declare war on Britain, citing the annexation of Cape Colony as its casus belli. Dumouriez' government expresses its disapproval and refuses to offer French military assistance, but stops short of any detailed condemnation.
 
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Just picked this up today; will there be quicker updates in the future? Very curious about how this plays out.
 
Just picked this up today; will there be quicker updates in the future? Very curious about how this plays out.
Whenever I can. I don't have the abundance of spare time many on here seem to, but I'll try bringing out installments more quickly from now.
 
What would you say is the main theme of the timeline so far, that a less Manic-Depressive French Revolution would've brought about moderate liberalism quicker in Europe?
 
Won't that in turn create a more vitrolic Romantic Nationalist movement though?

Also what will this mean for Frances' New World possessions? Will they still see them as liquidatable assets to offset their debt, assuming the Hispaniola revolt still occurs.

Oh also, might a Catalan Revolution also potentially encourage the New Spain colonies to rise up earlier than OTL as well?
 
I hope America somehow gets Luisiana. Without Napoleon and without intervening immediately on the side of the Dutch (who are about to get their asses kicked, I presume), this France doesn't have it back yet to sell to Jeffy.

The prospect of a more moderate Republican France, juxtaposed with Russia in Iran and a more reactionary Europe (oh God, alt-1848 is just going to be loverly, isn't it) creates a very interesting world. The whole "all France-style revolutions are unstable and violent" meme probably won't exist- there might also be more parallels made between Dumouriez and Cromwell, especially with the purging of radicals and the inclusion of some monarchists in government.

Still looking to see what happens to Nappy- and whether or not the sick man of Europe will get hit by the Revolutionary Wars this time around...
 
Oh jeez, I forgot that France sold Louisiana, got it back, and then sold it again.

Will France intervene in Catalonia or is it serious about normalizing relationships with Monarchies? Also does a more sane France give ammunition to English Republicans?
 
May 6th, 1797 – Louis Alexandre Berthier is appointed Foreign Minister by Dumouriez. A “husky brute of a human being” in the words of one disgruntled parliamentarian, he has nevertheless proven himself an individual of considerable intelligence and aptitude, instrumental in several French victories of the Italian campaign. Berthier’s hawkish tendencies render his nomination a tactical sop to the political and military firebrands undermining the Protector-General.

May 13th, 1797 – Dutch warships spring a daring night raid on the encircled British North Sea Fleet off Norway. The attack, though remarkably bold, is by any objective account a resounding strategic miscalculation on behalf of Vice Admiral Jan de Winter, who’s laughably outnumbered vessels sink just two frigates. Nevertheless, the episode achieves parochial notoriety in both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

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Tsar Paul of Russia.

May 24th, 1797 – Empress Catherine II of Russia collapses from a stroke. She is succeeded by her son, Paul, a withdrawn, impractical romantic flagrantly partial to a military alliance with the French. His personal detestation of General Zubov almost drives him to recall the Persian Expedition, but he is swayed by his general staff in the light of recent progress.

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The Parisian Cider Riot.

June 9th, 1797 – The First Cider Riot. Troops protesting pay and administrative corruption descend on the Paris suburbs, where, under the influence of cider distributed by sympathetic locals, they vandalise property and hound burghers. Twenty-two absconders are shot; the Executive, fearing a new wave of popular violence, makes additional moves towards appeasement, indicting eleven officers on charges of misconduct.

June 17th, 1797 – Catholic missionaries are received in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, following a covenant with representatives of the Emperor that limits their ability to publicly proselytise. They found an orphanage with a monastic ethic.

July 11th, 1797 – The Jervis-Miranda Expedition. A British fleet sails into Dutch Surinam and claims it for the crown, a move unabashedly welcomed by residents in several areas. The invasion force is bolstered by 2,000 Venezuelan mercenaries under Francisco di Miranda, who intends to establish a private presence, unbeknownst to cohort Sir John Jervis, in the north of the colony.

July 13th, 1797 – Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis, Prime Minister of Spain, is stabbed to death whilst walking the gardens of the Palacio Real de Madrid. The assassin, a young intellectual by the name of Haroldo Guadarrama, espouses anti-monarchist and apocalypticist sympathies; he identifies with the 'Sábana Santa', a clandestine pauper's sect responsible for acts of ritualistic violence against the Catalonian nobility.

August 3rd, 1797 – The 'Statute of 17 Thermidor', a proposition by monarchist Commissioners, is narrowly defeated after Dumouriez and de Kellermann intervene against it. The bill provides a framework for the reintroduction of slavery in several French colonial jurisdictions, including troubled Saint-Domingue. The Executive is bitterly divided, with Kléber, easily the most conservative of the Protector-Generals, endorsing it from the outset.
 
Is the revolutionary calendar going to last or are they going to return to a sensible calendar at some point?

Also- glad to see Pavel not screw up the Iranian intrigues...
 
What's the goal of Russia's Persian expedition at this point? Does it want complete control of the Caspian?
 
Is the revolutionary calendar going to last or are they going to return to a sensible calendar at some point?
Hmph, there's a tough cookie. Dumouriez' no Jacobin, but he's not a conservative, either, and the Republican Calendar provides an adequate enough degree of continuity to prevent his regime looking like some reactionary / pseudo-monarchist farce. With all its mathematical and geographical impracticalities, I can't see the system surviving long, though.
What's the goal of Russia's Persian expedition at this point? Does it want complete control of the Caspian?
The Expedition was launched by Catherine as a "punitive expedition" to chastize Persia for its meddling in Transcaucasia. So the whole thing is pretty open-ended, but you can expect Russia to settle for a slice of territory in the north, possibly some kind of trade or access privileges.
 
To what extent does Dumouriez want to make peace with the Monarchist nations that surround him? What are his relations with America? Given him intervening to stop the emancipation of slaves being revoked, I bet he isn't too impressed with America's version of liberty.
 
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