L’Aigle Triomphant: A Napoleonic Victory TL
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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Fair enough. Interested to see what you think of how things hash out in the end, appreciate your vast knowledge on Tsarist Russian matters as always!
Not too bad. Norway is still an impoverished backwater but the restitutions made to Denmark by Britain at Aix have been helpful and not losing Norway is nice for the Danes too, as is having something of a strong position in the Baltic League - below Russia, obviously, but ahead of Sweden, Prussia, Gdansk et al, and being something of a strong trade conduit between said league and other major European ports thanks to Copenhagen's strategic position.
The King and the Princess
The King and the Princess
Having ascended the throne in January of 1820, George IV came to prominence not as a symbol of a bold new age after the six-decade rule of his father but rather as a symbol of a tired establishment thanks to his nine-year regency on behalf of his severely mentally ill father, a regency in which Britain had been defeated on the Continent as well as the Americas and driven into a deep economic malaise after the Peace of Aix, made worse by the sharp decline of the British shipbuilding industry with the monopolization of timber exports by the Baltic League and the higher expense of importing Canadian wood. For all the riches of the East Indies inherited from Holland, the declinism of the Regency Era nonetheless persisted as George's personal profligate spending, scandals and noticed political preferences for his personal favorites became difficult to ignore.
British government was more democratic than almost any peer in the world sans the republican government of the United States, but suffrage was nonetheless severely limited to the propertied classes even in the Commons, and a sharp divide began to emerge within the Parliament between the Tory-dominated House of Lords, favored by the King, and the Whiggish House of Commons, thought to be favored by Charlotte, the Princess of Wales. It thus became a curious case in the 1820s that political disputes and debates in London came to be viewed by the public as a dispute and debate between father and daughter, with the landed nobility strongly in favor of the King as a stern paternal figure and the educated merchant classes and other commoners coming to sympathize with and, in the end, identify with Charlotte, a state of affairs that gave the future Queen enough popularity for the monarchy to survive its severe crises of the 1830s without revolution. [1] Charlotte came to be almost a messianic figure to some, referred to in friendly press as "the Anticipated" and her hypothetical reign mused of as a time of benevolence and national restoration after the debacles of the late Georgian and Regency era.
The battle between King and Princess was most embodied in the tenure of Lord Liverpool through most of the decade as Prime Minister. A "Tory's Tory," Liverpool had inherited a deeply indebted national government that stubbornly refused to continue its wartime income tax and was thus forced to continue aggressively borrowing and leveraging to sustain the Royal Navy and other state expenditures. It had banned the formation of trade unions in 1824 and hemmed and hawed on the matter of Catholic emancipation, a question of keen interest in Ireland, as well as a stout refusal to consider the expansion of the franchise; due to violent reactions from farmers, it had introduced protectionism via the Corn Laws to support the price of grains in the United Kingdom, ending decades of free trade policy. In opposition to this Tory government were two prominent Lords, the Earl Grey and the Marquess of Lansdowne, who articulated policies of reform in the economy, system of education and political settlement of Britain, and Charlotte went out of her way, to the disapproval of the British establishment and even her own husband Prince William Frederick, of establishing a close personal relationship with both of these men, openly currying their favor while acting as a political patron to them very visibly in public. While Charlotte did not express personal opinions on questions of government in order to not publicly undercut her father, the open bond she formed with them made it clear where her sympathies lay and what a Charlottean reign could look like for Britain, which only served to further radicalize some corners of society to see what they could reasonably accomplish once she was on the throne.
These agitations came to be seen by King George IV and his Tory ministers, particularly Liverpool, as open defiance by Whiggish enemies and petulance by his own daughter, but nonetheless the policy of abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire was successfully achieved during this time. And for all the splits apparent in British society and the political establishment during the increasingly polarized 1820s, Tory and Whig alike came together to pursue a joint policy as the Balkans descended into crisis in late 1822, with all of London in agreement regardless of political affiliation that this was the perfect opportunity for Britain to break out of its post-Aix malaise...
[1] The British monarchy really did nearly collapse in the early 1830s, it was that unpopular. Victoria did much to restore its credibility with the public.
Good chapter, hope Britain doesn't face a revolution of it's own in the future.
We have a bit of a different circumstance here - the UK lost the Napoleonic Wars, but Charlotte lives. This puts the UK behind the ball in the 1820s but her personal popularity (at least when she’s a hypothetical) probably creates release mechanism to forego genuine revolutionary impulses.
Plenty of runway left, though, and I’ll admit that a Republican Britain has a certain appeal to it
Lotte will have her hands full that's for sure, let's hope she can prevent that from happening. Less the continent gets any ideas as well.
Well, in OTL there was pretty much a worst case scenario for everybody involved. Of course, I’m talking short-/middle-term. Superficially:
The peasants:
- Did not get freedom immediately and remained “temporary obliged” for a number of following years.
- Did not get too much in the terms of their own (or rather “communal”) land.
- Had been saddled with the huge payments to the state (which was expecting to get something like 200% of a net profit) for the following decades. Their purchasing ability was severely crippled.
- Traditional product selling system was destroyed and the new one could not be created overnight.
- With the Russian manufacture being suppressed by the foreign imports, the poorest peasants could not find job in the cities.
- Got release payments not in money but in the form of certificates which could be redeemed through the private buyers and, becausethe market got flooded with these certificates, they could be sold only at a considerable discount.
- A big part of the land-owners, especially the minor ones, did not have enough cash to hire the laborers and buy a modern equipment, not to mention hiring the specialists in management and agriculture.
- Most of them would sell the rest of their agricultural land or to rent it to the peasants or to live for a while by selling their forests, etc.
- Many, not being able to readjust to the new conditions, ended up being financially destroyed and replaced by the new “rural capitalists”.
- Getting a big pile of cash was seductive and many of them just travelled abroad to spend these money in Paris.
- Had a huge and lasting problem of trying to find a workable balance between wish to preserve nobility as a ruling class and a need to accommodate the new players.
- Eventually faced a land-shortage problem which found it absolutely unprepared: shortage of money caused by the expensive wars (Caucasus, CA, Balkans) prevented timely expansion of the railroads to the Western Siberia.
- More than once had to cut % on the peasants’ debt and eventually cancel the leftover.
- Nobility as a meaningful support base of the regime was seriously damaged while the peasantry was too amorphous to play such a role.
err @CalBear, is there something wrong here
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The Liberal Kingdom - Part I
The Liberal Kingdom - Part I
The quarter-century of wars that had concluded the 18th century and begun the 19th had utterly reshaped the maps of Europe both on paper and in noble genealogy; Bonapartes sat on the thrones of not just France but Naples, Etruria, Holland and Westphalia, and a number of Napoleon's generals had been given titles both great and minor across Germany and Italy to compensate them for their efforts. The complete and total reworking of maps and monarchies post-1789 was a comprehensive and revolutionary change, though certainly not the one that the revolutionaries at the Bastille and Paris' guillotines thereafter had imagined. One place which had seen a particularly remarkable, and unique, change was Portugal, on Europe's far western periphery, where Napoleon had deposed the ruling Braganza family and forced them into a Brazilian exile and then appointed Charles I as the "Boy King of Lisbon," compensating the Bourbons of Parma for their losses in Italy and hoping to ingratiate the Spanish Bourbons with the grandson of King Charles IV on the throne.
Portugal post-1808 had thus seen a dramatic economic, cultural and political seismic shift as the conservative, wealthy Portuguese government elite had largely followed the Braganzas to Portugal. This meant clergymen, bureaucrats, generals, artisans, treasurers - the upper crust of Portugal's civil society in Lisbon had simply decamped on the boats with British escorts. Charles I, thus, inherited a hollowed-out state poorly equipped to reach and influence her colonies overseas. The collapse in trade during the years 1808-15 with British harassment of Portuguese vessels had broken the nascent mercantile middle classes of Porto in particular, and fiercely Anglophobic, semi-revolutionary sentiment was running high throughout the depressed Portuguese cities at this time. Tens of thousands left the country to follow the "True King" into exile in Brazil, while others migrated elsewhere in the Americas.
Thus, unlike elsewhere in Europe, the Peace of Aix was not celebrated as the dawning of a glorious new age of prosperity but rather seen ruefully as Europe forgetting about little Portugal's needs, and feelings of a country adrift were quite understandable. Between a minor king dominated by his Spanish mother (Charles had been enthroned at the ripe age of eight) and the effective end of the longstanding alliance with Britain, nobody in Lisbon was quite sure what was to come next. In particular, concerns about Spanish designs on economically and politically dominating their smaller, considerably poorer neighbor led to the Queen Regent Maria Luisa creating a massive levy to rebuild and re-equip the Portuguese Army in 1815, one of the few places in Europe that rearmed after Aix rather than sending soldiers not just back to their barracks but back to their fields and workshops.
To the advantage of Charles I, however, was the fact that the most natural opponents of his regime were all in Brazil and the odds that they were to return were small; the agitation amongst the crippled merchant classes in Portugal was for more rights, not for the return of the absolutist Braganzas. That is why his most fervent enemies at the time his minority ended with his eighteenth birthday in December of 1817 were people he could placate through reforms, rather than those who wished for a return of the Portugal of old. The end of Maria Luisa's stricter, more austere regency is thus largely viewed as the beginning of what in Portugal is known as the "Liberal Kingdom" - the reformist zeal of the late 1810s and the 1820s in which Charles, who was wholly uninterested in ruling, devolved tremendous powers to his ministers and to intermediate bodies of authority. New schools and hospitals were established, freer trade was encouraged without strict stipulations, and taxes were gradually lowered. Finally, in 1828, Charles I promulgated a constitution for the whole of Portugal rather than ad hoc organic laws for various regions, becoming one of the first monarchs to not only move towards Napoleonic reforms of their own will but to go a step beyond and look to constitutionalism itself as a fundamental right...
Portugal underwent a fair bit of turbulence in OTL‘s 1820s, here the Liberals basically just succeed from the beginning. Plus - no British imposition of import control
Thanks!
Sweet! May the Portoguese Bourbons prosper in their rule, unlike the Bourbons in Sicily who must spent all their time sulking.
Amen to that, although they may show more care to the island now.
Here's to a hope of a Portugal that doesn't get a bad 19th century, the brain drain is quite bad but it basically allows the country to buildup a administration loyal to the king as well as not tied to the old power structures.
That’s more or less the idea. The immediate 1808-28 period is worse - probably a lot worse - but a more distinctly liberal, innovative administration forming without the old structures trying to suppress them sets Portugal up well as a European entrepôt moving forward
I think that the political divergences will also lead to economic and cultural/linguistic divergences between Portugal and Brazil to a greater extent than OTL. Furthermore, are the other Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, Sao Tome in Africa, and Goa, Macau, Timor Leste in Asia) going to Portugal or Brazil?