Look to the West -- Thread II
- Thread starter Thande
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A very Hilarious in Hindsight moment.
Though to be honest, I find it very ironic that TTL Britain is in much worse shape than say, Feng China, in a TL written by an Englishman.
Thande
Donor
Why? Are all TLs written by Americans Ameriwanks? A TL writer should have the maturity to write a timeline regardless of their own chauvinism...STOP LOOKING AT THAT SECONDARY CAPITAL I HAD THEM BUILD IN DONCASTER!A very Hilarious in Hindsight moment.
Though to be honest, I find it very ironic that TTL Britain is in much worse shape than say, Feng China, in a TL written by an Englishman.
Is it worrying that I can't tell if you're being facetious, pissed off, or a mix of both?
Thande
Donor
If in doubt, it's always facetious.
The Girl in the Fireplace? One of the best episodes of Series 2. I should add some homage to that by involving banana daiquiris in one of the scenes set in Paris...Watcher some Dr. Who and he's in 1727 . . .
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
I think that cat got out of the bag the first time you referred to London as Mordor, actually.
You know that actually reminds me that even though I don't like how my country is effed up, I can't think of a way to wank it in any TL idea I have.
I blame my Europhilia.
I blame my Europhilia.
You could make 5 Royals equal 1 (British) Imperial to be more confusing/evil.
You know that actually reminds me that even though I don't like how my country is effed up, I can't think of a way to wank it in any TL idea I have.
I blame my Europhilia.
I'm as big a Europhile as they come, and I'm part of the Strangerverse authorship group.
For those of you that don't know, we wank our chosen country out of all proportion, so that it will eventually TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!!!!
I've already done Britain (
), and am now on France eek.
Thande
Donor
Part #105: Diamonds Are Forever
Dr D. Wostyn: Ben—I mean, Captain MacCaulay—has reminded me that these introductions, however short, nonetheless take up some of our broadcast bandwidth each day and are somewhat superfluous given his own reports. Therefore I shall refrain from giving them in the future unless further clarification of historical data is required. Wostyn out.
*
“If the Near East and India gave birth to all the world’s great religions, then you, fair Corsica, share a similar distinction in the field of political ideology. An island small you may be, yet you have given birth to ideas that have changed the world, not once but several times...”
*
From – “MIDDLE SEA: A History of the Mediterranean – Volume VII: The Watchful Peace and the Popular Wars” (Oxford University Press, 1978):
On some level, regardless of the wider conflicts that dominated the region, the history of the Mediterranean region in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth revolves around the axis of Corsica. The island, long ruled by the Republic of Genoa, finally broke free in 1755 after many earlier rebellions. Under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli, the Corsicans formed a new Republic: not one of the medieaval oligarchies like Venice or indeed Genoa itself, but the first Republic built on the principles of the Enlightenment. The Corsican Republic was laid out according to a constitution that would later be amended, but from the start contained details of the unusual mixture of radical ideas that would make it so influential and inspirational to other movements. The Republic made the Virgin Mary ceremonial head of state, recognising the place of the Catholic Church, but power rested in the President of the Diet. The members of the Diet were elected by the people and the President elected in a separate popular election which might have inspired the Presidency-General system in the UPSA.[1] The President was also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and the chief justice, but the Diet delegates also retained considerable power. What made the Republic particularly remarkable was that it had the most wide-ranging suffrage in the world at the time of its formation. Universal suffrage was implemented from the start, with all men over 25 having the vote. There is some controversy over whether Corsica’s other famous early achievement was truly in place from the start or whether at first it only applied to local elections for the Podestà (city magistrate); however, in reputation at least, Corsica has always been known as the place where female suffrage began. To that end it has an iconic place in the ideological mythology of the Cythereans as well as so many other groups.
At first the republican rebels only held the countryside while the Genoese still held the coastal cities, including the largest city of Ajaccio; to that end, the Republic was based in the inland city of Corte. As well as the Diet being based there, according to Enlightenment principles a university was also chartered there. While the University of Corte had a few false starts, it went on to be one of the most famous educational institutions in the world, principally because—again—it was the first university to admit women, albeit only for certain specialist subjects, in 1821.
The Genoese continued to suffer reversals throughout the 1750s and 60s, distracted by the Wars of Supremacy squeezing the trade that was their lifeblood, with Corsica increasingly being seen as an unprofitable running sore. In 1764 the last cities were taken and the Genoese expelled from the island altogether, but it was not until three years later when the Corsicans manned a makeshift navy and seized the island of Capraia—which had been Genoese since the sixteenth century—that the Gran Consiglio of Genoa could see the writing on the wall. To that end, Genoa sold the island to the Kingdom of France, which embarked on a campaign against the Republic. At least Genoa won back Capraia for the moment, while France invaded Corsica in 1768 and had completed the conquest of much of the island within a year—though, again, Paoli’s republican rebels continued to hold the interior and kept up a Kleinkrieg against the occupiers.[2] Although France had a much larger and better trained military than Genoa, she found the island no easier to completely subdue and found that Paoli’s republican ideals filtered back to France through the soldiers stationed there. Thus Corsica, along with the UPSA later on, was the major source of radical ideas circulating through France and in particular the military: greatly important, for if the French regiments had remained unquestionably loyal to the King, the Revolution would have been impossible.
The French occupation of Corsica, though brief from the perspective of history, left several significant effects upon the island. The man history knows as Charles Bone, who had been Paoli’s secretary during the Republic, fled the island for Britain along with the rest of his family, then known as the ‘Buonapartes’. Who can guess how history might have played out if Bone had decided to stay and his son Leo had grown up in Corsica? Perhaps he would have been a great president or war leader of the Republic: still, it is hard to see how he could have matched the epic achievements of the man we know not only to have scored victories for Britain but to have dominated and reformed France.
And of course it was through this man that Corsica regained her independence. When the Revolution came to France in 1794, the ideals that had been born in Corsica were expanded and taken to extremes by the Jacobins. The city of Toulon was held by the Royalist Admiral d’Estaing, who sent part of his fleet to Corsica to bring back supplies to help the city hold out against the Revolutionary army of General Custine. But the knowledge of where they were going sparked Revolutionary sentiment among the crews of those ships, and many mutinied. Some turned to ‘Democratic Piracy’ and were still randomly raiding any nation’s ships in the name of the Revolution as late as 1800, but the majority beached their craft on Corsica and deserted. With them they brought news of the Revolution, and it was while indulging in an ‘exploratory action’[3] of his old homeland that Captain Leo Bone observed the start of a complicated three-way conflict between the Revolutionary mutineers, the loyalists among the French stationed in Ajaccio, and Paoli’s old republicans who took advantage of the chaos to return from the interior and try to reclaim the island.
Bone, of course, used the knowledge from his observations to pull off his famously audacious gamble in persuading Admiral d’Estaing to come over to the British with his fleet, pre-empting the actual alliance between Britain and the royalist remnants. He also achieved contact with the ageing Paoli, using their familial connection to help achieve his goals. The Royal Navy, which now thought Bone could do no wrong, backed up Paoli’s men and helped them seize the island again, while at the same time declaring a protectorate over Malta. While Malta would eventually be handed over to the International Counter-Piracy Agency by bankrupt Britain in 1817, the Corsican Republic would continue to allow British ships to operate from its ports for the forseeable future: she became Britain’s biggest naval base in the Mediterranean.
The restored Republic weathered the Jacobin Wars well. When the Royal Navy sold off large numbers of its ships after Charles James Fox came to power in 1800, the Diet voted to buy three fifth- and sixth-rate frigates to form the core of a proper navy. She was also able to attract numerous ex-Royal Navy sailors who had been paid off. There are even unconfirmed claims that President Paoli hoped to tempt Leo Bone into becoming Admiral of the Fleet for his ancestral homeland, though of course in the event Bone was catapulted into a position of power in France instead. Those first three ships were named Presidente, Salvi Regina and Republica, and the Corsicans quickly threw them into action against Algerine pirates, building up experience and letting their foreign advisors become integrated with their inexperienced native sailors. Corsica would later become an important contributor to the ICPA.
Corsica’s willingness to fight and alliance with Britain helped protect them during the wars. Lisieux had little interest in the island, except in that it could be the source of conflicting ideology, but that was what mass control of all forms of media was for preventing, was it not? In any case, Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Minorca in 1803 torpedoed any serious Republican French presence in the Mediterranean until the days of Le Grand Crabe. Corsica’s apparently charmed existence met with natural resentment from other countries, and propaganda from the Hapsburgs in particular claimed that the island republic was deliberately allowed its independence by the Republican French, painting them as both inspiration for and collaborators with the Jacobins, and complicit in all their crimes de guerre. The Corsicans’ concern over this only increased when the former Italian Latin Republic fell into Hapsburg hands in the latter stages of the Jacobin Wars and became the Kingdom of Italy. With the Hapsburgs now in control of the old territory of Genoa, there was always the possibility that King Ferdinand could decide to stake a claim on Corsica, and Britain by now was too weak and self-absorbed to be relied upon if it came to war. In order to combat the Hapsburg threat, the Corsicans pursued alliances with foes of the Hapsburgs like the Sardinians, the Neapolitans and, more theoretically, the Concert of Germany. It was the first of these that proved the most complex of the relationships.
Sardinia had had a somewhat complicated history. In the early Middle Ages it had been ruled by small native kingdoms, the giudicari or ‘judicaries’, so called because they were descended from Byzantine judges who had seized control over the island after the Empire pulled out in the ninth century. Though several Italian republics including Genoa and Pisa had minor possessions in the island, it was these giudicari that dominated into the 1400s. Sardinia was gradually conquered by Aragon after the Pope proclaimed a “Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica” under Aragonese rule in 1297. (It is worth noting that Corsica was never actually part of this kingdom except on paper, but the historical precedent became important later). Aragon entered personal union with Castile in 1469, forming what is generally known as Spain, although the two would not be formally subsumed into one state until much later. In 1506 Spain, and therefore Sardinia, became a Hapsburg possession; the island was considered to remain with the Spanish Hapsburgs after the abdication of Charles V split the Hapsburg dominions into Spanish and Austrian portions. However, with the extinction of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the War of the Spanish Succession ending with a Bourbon on the Spanish throne, Sardinia was transferred to the Austrian Hapsburgs as part of the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the war in 1713. By this point Sardinia had acquired something of a reputation as being the possession nobody wanted, being viewed as poor, plague-ridden and backward.
As another consequence of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke of Savoy Victor Amadeus II had received Sicily, which as a kingdom elevated him to kingly rank as he desired. But this situation did not last long: during the War of the Quadruple Alliance soon afterwards, the Austrians were able to threaten Victor Amadeus into swapping Sardinia for Sicily in exchange for their help against the Spanish (who, incidentally, were also invading Sardinia in the course of the war). Victor Amadeus tried to wriggle out of this promise later on, but in the end Savoy was forced to yield Sicily and take on Sardinia. Not that the Hapsburg possession of Sicily lasted long, either: soon Sicily and Naples would be under Spanish Bourbon rule after the War of the Austrian Succession.
Therefore Sardinia had a recent history of being treated as a particularly low-grade bargaining chip in the Wars of Supremacy. Things changed however with the Jacobin Wars. France invaded and conquered the House of Savoy’s continental possessions, and King Charles Emmanuel IV managed to escape to Sardinia. He ruled in exile from the capital of Cagliari.[4] Being realistic, Charles Emmanuel knew there was no way to reclaim Piedmont himself with the meagre resources he had, and also knew that the best way to regain it would be to support the winning side as much as he could and position himself to claim that a Piedmont under his rule would make a useful buffer state.[5] Like the Corsicans to his north, he mostly supported the British naval forces in the Mediterranean, and also the Neapolitans to some extent. However in the end Britain was severely weakened by the French invasion of 1807 and was in no position to make claims at the Congress of Copenhagen of this type, and Naples though more sympathetic was also unable to dislodge the Hapsburgs from Piedmont as part of their Kingdom of Italy. So the House of Savoy was reduced to this single, poor island that nobody wanted.
Charles Emmanuel IV died in 1814 (some say of a broken heart) and was succeeded by his son Victor Felix I.[6] While Charles Emmanuel had been a realist, Victor Felix was less so. Named optimistically—‘lucky triumph’—he constantly had the humiliation of his House in mind and his passion was intriguing in Continental politics, trying to find a place for the House of Savoy to wedge its boot into the door. His own disdain for his poor island kingdom was no secret, provoking resentment among the Sardinian people that did not go unnoted by their Corsican neighbours.
And it was also in this time that Corsica had its most celebrated visitor...
*
From – “Great Political Figures of the Last Three Centuries” by Michael P. Lamb (1987) –
Henri Phillipe de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (a.k.a. ‘Henri Rouvroy’), 1761-1827.[7] One of the most influential figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though he lived much of his life in the eighteenth. Born into an aristocratic French family, a younger branch of the Dukes of Saint-Simon, he was a true Renaissance man as well as a Revolutionary one, conceiving grand schemes such as the Nicaragua Canal a century[8] before their construction. He appears to have embraced radical ideas from a young age, though perhaps a better word is ‘outrageous’. In his twenties, against the wishes of his family, he signed up for the French army and served as an ensign and lieutenant in the Duke of Noailles’ army in the Second Platinean War. Rouvroy was part of the French army in Buenos Aires to surrender at the end of the war, and it is believed that he considered staying there, having become excited by the republican ideals of the new nation. However he decided to return to France and became part of various radical clubs. He enthusiastically embraced the Revolution in 1794, and it is here that his part in later history would be defined.
Rouvroy witnessed Le Diamant speaking and even his death in the confusion of the mob as panicky soldiers and Sans-Culottes opened fire. According to Rouvroy’s account, which is disputed, Le Diamant was actually shot by someone in the crowd; however, Rouvroy himself acknowledged that he was towards the back of the rambunctious crowd and could not see very clearly. Rouvroy disowned his aristocratic background and joined the Jacobins, becoming a member of the National Legislative Assembly. Somehow he managed to survive Robespierre’s early purges and, still hungry for adventure, joined General Hoche’s campaign in Italy. Because of this, he was out of the country when the Double Revolution meant Lisieux took over, and stayed with Hoche in the Italian Latin Republic. Lisieux viewed Rouvroy as a potential threat: he was intent on rewriting the history of the early Revolution to minimise the role of Le Diamant, and he did not need any inconvenient witnesses about. He had managed to track down most of those who still lived who had been there that day and had them dealt with, but Rouvroy was a high-profile irritant. It appears that Rouvroy went to his death unaware that Lisieux had paid for assassins to remove him while in Italy—an unusual move for Lisieux who usually viewed death as a crass waste, and showing how much Lisieux feared his existence. Rouvroy survived the assassination attempts, which he was convinced were all attacks on someone else, such as Hoche: his natural humility comes through in all his writings.
Rouvroy first became disillusioned with the Revolution after witnessing the Rape of Rome. Though only a lapsed Catholic himself, he had seen enough of Le Diamant’s speeches to know that the great man himself would have been horrified at these actions against the Pope and the people of Rome. He would later write: “This simple truth, of seeing the Sans-Culottes rampage over the city like a latter-day version of Alaric’s Goths[9] and knowing that the man whose name they chanted would have turned away from them in shame, revealed to me how insidious matters can be when the adherents of an idea take it to a place without control. It came to me then that all the abuses we had seen under the ancien regime, all the corruption of the nobles and the priests, was one and the same as what I now saw: ideas for ruling that had been good and honest to begin with, but had been twisted and corrupted by fallible men. I realised that we had thrown the baby out with the bathwater, dismissing things such as religion and alienating their adherents when we were just as guilty of using our beliefs as a means to an end and committing grievous crimes in the process.”
This revelation would go on to inform Rouvroy’s later works. In the short term, however, he remained with Hoche when the general was forced to return to France after the Hapsburgs and Neapolitans rolled up his Republic. Though Lisieux reluctantly accepted Hoche back, Rouvroy was quickly clapped in irons. It is uncertain why Lisieux did not just kill him at this stage: some biographers suggest that Lisieux believed in some mystical manner that the reason why his earlier assassins had failed was precisely because he had stepped away from his usual doctrine of the sanctity of life, and therefore he must appease whatever gods he believed in. This is debatable, but what is known is that Rouvroy was enslaved as part of a work gang constructing more Surcouf-class steam-galleys in Toulon. The work was deliberately hard and designed ultimately to kill its workers after extracting every last bit of use the Administration could get from them, but Rouvroy still had his spirit and grimly survived. He was nonetheless at the end of his tether when Nelson’s Corsican-Neapolitan forces attacked Toulon in 1807 and he, along with the rest of the surviving slaves, were set free. It was here that he encountered Corsicans for the first time, as he would later recount.
Due to the chaos in France, Rouvroy initially went to Naples and lived under an assumed name, at one point going to Rome and going through the first confession since he was a young man, speaking of his part in the burning of the city several years before. It is, however, apocryphal that the priest that heard his confession was the future Pope Innocent XIV. Rouvroy returned to France in 1810, racing to Paris where General Boulanger faced the allied forces, including the turncoat republicans under Bourcier, in the last great battle of the Jacobin Wars. “It is well that I did not arrive until the matter was decided,” he wrote in his diary, “as I still am uncertain which side I would have joined.” In the aftermath of the battle and the foundation of the new Kingdom, Rouvroy joined Bourcier’s parti de la liberté, commonly known as the Rouges, and was soon elected to the Grand-Parlement as a deputy. Rouvroy both admired and despised Bonaparte, rapidly becoming frustrated with Bonaparte’s ability to govern as Prime Minister despite his parti modéré (or Bleus) not even being the largest party in the Hemicycle.[10] Rouvroy advocated to Bourcier that they seize on particular issues to try and divide Bonaparte’s Bleus in the hope of building their own power. Bourcier, however, said that doing so ran the risk of a large part of the Bleus joining with the parti royaliste or Blancs to keep the Rouges out. Better for the Rouges to bide their time and build their power within Bonaparte’s system, Bourcier said.
Naturally, the dynamic Rouvroy felt stifled under this and had several public disagreements with Bourcier, alienating parts of the Rouge party. In the end Rouvroy decided he had better take some time away from the Parlement to allow tempers to cool. He took advantage of the fact that Bonaparte was going to Britain in 1813 for his father’s funeral, and seized this time to go on his own foreign trip, which he called “A pilgrimage to the cradle of republicanism”. He was going to Greece.
In 1813 Rouvroy was fifty-two years old, and British diarist and poet John Byron III (q.v.) was only 26. Nonetheless the two of them got along like a house on fire when they met in Athens in early 1814. Both men had come with similar aims, though Byron was more interested in the architecture and art (and the women...) then politics. And both left in disappointment. It was the calm before the storm, with people across the Ottoman Empire (accurately) feeling that all hell would break loose as soon as Dalmat Melek Pasha died. Byron and Rouvroy witnessed several early riots and risings by angry Greeks in their time in the region and were not impressed. “It is the firmly held belief of romantics in our nation, and many others, that the people of Greece under the Turkish yoke are the same noble masters of the arts and the sciences who lived before Christ and inspired our own civilisation. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. The current inhabitants of the region we name Greece are nothing more than another gang of Slavic savages, quite interchangeable with the Servs or the Bulgars,” Byron wrote scathingly; some have suggested his particular distaste for the Greeks may have been due to contracting gonorrhea from a lady of Lepanto. Rouvroy was similar in his views: “He who goes on a pilgrimage for republicanism would be wise to avoid its cradle, for the baby was long ago thrown out and all that remains are his filthy couches-culottes,” he wrote. Both men published well-received books describing their travels that went on to have what scholars agree to be a significant impact on popular European views of the Ottoman Time of Troubles a few years later. Not everything the two writers said was negative: both expressed admiration for the Albanian highlanders who the local Ottoman authorities deployed to crush the local rioters. Byron compared them to the highlanders from the Scotland of his childhood, right down to their choice of kilts as battle dress: savage and uncouth but fine, uncorruptible warriors.[11]
It is believed that his friendship with Byron led Rouvroy to improve his writing style, becoming more amenable and engrossing for the casual reader, which doubtless helped his later career. Byron also may have inspired Rouvroy’s mild anti-industrialism, with Byron having left Britain partly because he was in trouble for defending John Sutcliffe’s machine-breakers in the face of the Churchill regime’s authoritarian response.[12] Rouvroy would mainly express this in later life through his wandering, almost poetic interludes praising the rural beauty of the Corsican countryside.
Rouvroy returned to France after hearing of the assassination of King Louis XVII. By the time he arrived, of course, everything had died down. Bourcier had been hanged by the mob from a gas-light, Bonaparte had seized power as Regent over the young King Charles X, and Aumont and Barras had been exiled to Louisiana. Essentially all the political parties had been decapitated. Rouvroy seized the opportunity to try and become leader of the chaos that had been the Rouge Party.
There was no formal procedure for electing a leader, so Rouvroy invented one and it was approved. However, in the actual contest, Rouvroy faced Pierre Artaud. Artaud had been a close ally of Bourcier, a former Sans-Culottes organiser, and was a nasty piece of work in the same vein as the late General Lascelles. Though everyone could see that Artaud would be a disaster as leader, he was able to intimidate enough Rouge deputies into supporting him and Rouvroy lost the vote. He swiftly left the country again—whether out of disgust or out of fear that Artaud wouldn’t stop there is unknown—and Artaud predictably led the Rouges to disorganisation and the electoral wilderness while Bonaparte reigned supreme.
Rouvroy decided his next—and last, as it turned out—exile would be in what he dubbed the cradle of the modern republic, Corsica. He instantly fell in love with the island and its quiet radicalism. By this point women were unambiguously permitted to vote in Diet and Presidential elections and Rouvroy was fascinated by a point that no Jacobin had ever thought to raise. Only a few of his works can really be said to be Cytherean in nature but he did have some influence over the movement when it rose to prominence.
But, of course, Rouvroy is best known for being the founder of Adamantianism. He was first inspired to write his greatest work when speaking to two Frenchmen of a similar age, both of whom were mutineers who had escaped Admiral d’Estaing’s fleet for the island back in 1795 and had lived here ever since. They reflected to him that they had only heard about the Revolution by report in the first place, neither of them really knew anything about Le Diamant or its origins, and now few people remained who knew anything at all, what with Lisieux’s largely successful extirpation of all records about the man. Rouvroy became depressed and then decided to dedicate the remainder of his life to ensuring at least one personal record existed. He wrote numerous books about the history of the Revolution, but of course his best-known work is the book generally known by the short form of its Latin title: Cor Adamantis, or Heart of Diamond. This was primarily intended as a rough biography of Le Diamant, or at least Rouvroy’s reminiscences of the man. Though Rouvroy knew little and his painstaking research revealed little more, the work is nonetheless still considered to be the best of what few sources exist on that enigmatic, inadvertent architect of the modern world.
Almost by accident while writing the book, Rouvroy ended up discussing the political views he himself had grown to have over the years. He wrote of his horror at the Rape of Rome and his disgust at how authoritarian regimes as in Austria and Britain had used the excesses of the Revolution as an excuse to clamp down and sweep away what reforms had been made under Enlightenment liberals. “Do not look to the France of the past for a model of republicanism,” he wrote. “Look to the UPSA, yes; but also look to Corsica. Here a republican system has been maintained for more than half a century, with none of the excess we have known to our regret. For all this people’s reputation for vendetta, no Corsican President ever ordered the building of a phlogisticateur with which to murder his people on a whim. No-one ever burned a church simply because it was a church, and because of that, the small deistic-atheist minority can raise a Temple to Reason without much fear of the same happening in kind. Many of the people here are Jansenists now, and it is a faith I find myself increasingly drawn to: preserving the core precepts of Christianity brought down through the ages, but dismissive of the temporal power of a prince in Rome.[13] At its heart, this is a manner of government where laws are enacted not for the sake of fulfilling some ideological goal, but because there is a general agreement that they are needed to improve the lives of all. It is, I feel, a manner of government that Le Diamant would have looked upon and smiled in approval.”
Rouvroy was by this point already acknowledged as the greatest authority on Le Diamant, and this bold claim held more water than it would have if made by any other author. After being asked by philosophers to expand on his political views—in his twilight years Rouvroy also took on a position at the University of Corte lecturing on political philosophy—Rouvroy wrote several more works on the subject, and it is from these that the ideology he created was defined. Its name, however, came from that first book: Adamantianism, or the Adamantine Way: the way Le Diamant would have wanted it. Adamantianism, like any other ideology, has of course had many schisms and disagremeents and different schools of thought over the years. However, its core precepts have not changed. Adamantianism stands for government of moderation, government of principle, government of pragmatism. It stands for consensus where possible and gentlemanly disagreement where not. It seeks the pursuit of progressive goals from within the system: Rouvroy criticised previous attempts at reform from below as being at one or the other extreme of a scale. “The peasant revolters of the past took the king’s word on trust and then happily returned to their farms to be slaughtered; the revolutionaries of the present day want to kill every man who has ever had pretensions to any class above the lowest of the low. Let the reformers of the lower class confront the ruling elite, within the system wherever possible but outside it if not, and let them wield an iron fist in a velvet glove: do not threaten the elite without cause, but let them know that they face consequences if they dismiss such protests.”
The clarifications expressed in the later works have helped define modern Adamantianism more precisely. Though Rouvroy was a republican all his life, he wrote that it was better to achieve progressive goals for the lower classes within a constitutional monarchy than to seek its overthrow by violent revolution that had the change of producing a tyrant like Lisieux. He believed republics were always preferable to monarchies, but not at the cost of an ocean of blood, and wrote that ‘Adamantianism’ was compatible with constitutional monarchy: indeed, Le Diamant had sought reform by that means. Rouvroy attempted to replicate Le Diamant’s original “La Carte” from memory – which Lisieux had tried, mostly with success, to have every copy destroyed and altered forgeries produced to confuse the matter. He also made his own version to better fit a modern and worldwide vision, applicable to any country rather than just France. Rouvroy’s Carte set out the goals of any Adamantine movement in order, starting with seeking a representative, elected assembly, then seeking to expand its powers, then enacting laws to better the lot of the poor, and so on.
Rouvroy died even as the Popular Wars broke out, but while Adamantianism would be an important factor within that conflict, it would continue to be one of the most influential ideologies in the world to the present day.
[1] And in OTL the Presidency of the USA.
[2] The term is, obviously, used anachronistically, much as one might hear the actions of Americans during the American Revolutionary War described as ‘guerilla warfare’ in OTL.
[3] I.e. espionage.
[4] Also happened in OTL during the Napoleonic Wars.
[5] Also happened in OTL, but successfully.
[6] OTL, Charles Emmanuel IV had no children and, after the death of his wife in 1802, he abdicated the throne and was succeeded by his brother as Victor Emmanuel I. In TTL though his political fortunes are less fortunate his personal ones are more so.
[7] An ATL brother of OTL’s Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. Born some years after the POD, so not the same person, but had the same parents and upbringing so is somewhat comparable. Note that in OTL he abbreviated his name to ‘Henri de Saint-Simon’ – the different contraction he chooses here reflects different usage on the part of the different Revolution here.
[8] AH Cliché #12403523, check.
[9] Who sacked Rome in AD 410.
[10] Like OTL, the French Grand-Parlement is based on a hemicycle rather than opposing benches as in the Westminster system. Unlike OTL, what we would call the political right sits on the left of the hemicycle and vice-versa, but right and left are not used as political terms in TTL anyway.
[11] OTL’s Byron made this same observation, and it is responsible for Albanian national dress having been somewhat hijacked by Greece in OTL.
[12] John Sutcliffe is the TTL equivalent of Ned Ludd (if he existed) and Luddite machine-breakers in TTL are referred to as Sutcliffists. OTL’s Byron also defended the Luddites. Rouvroy’s position here is very different to that of the OTL Saint-Simon, who enthusiastically endorsed the idea of an industrial civilisation built on scientific principles.
[13] This is a slightly milder version of OTL Saint-Simon’s views on Christianity: he advocated the dismissal of all structure and a return to a personal relationship with God.
~~~
Comments?
Thande
Dr D. Wostyn: Ben—I mean, Captain MacCaulay—has reminded me that these introductions, however short, nonetheless take up some of our broadcast bandwidth each day and are somewhat superfluous given his own reports. Therefore I shall refrain from giving them in the future unless further clarification of historical data is required. Wostyn out.
*
“If the Near East and India gave birth to all the world’s great religions, then you, fair Corsica, share a similar distinction in the field of political ideology. An island small you may be, yet you have given birth to ideas that have changed the world, not once but several times...”
—Georges Gallet, 1846
*
From – “MIDDLE SEA: A History of the Mediterranean – Volume VII: The Watchful Peace and the Popular Wars” (Oxford University Press, 1978):
On some level, regardless of the wider conflicts that dominated the region, the history of the Mediterranean region in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth revolves around the axis of Corsica. The island, long ruled by the Republic of Genoa, finally broke free in 1755 after many earlier rebellions. Under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli, the Corsicans formed a new Republic: not one of the medieaval oligarchies like Venice or indeed Genoa itself, but the first Republic built on the principles of the Enlightenment. The Corsican Republic was laid out according to a constitution that would later be amended, but from the start contained details of the unusual mixture of radical ideas that would make it so influential and inspirational to other movements. The Republic made the Virgin Mary ceremonial head of state, recognising the place of the Catholic Church, but power rested in the President of the Diet. The members of the Diet were elected by the people and the President elected in a separate popular election which might have inspired the Presidency-General system in the UPSA.[1] The President was also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and the chief justice, but the Diet delegates also retained considerable power. What made the Republic particularly remarkable was that it had the most wide-ranging suffrage in the world at the time of its formation. Universal suffrage was implemented from the start, with all men over 25 having the vote. There is some controversy over whether Corsica’s other famous early achievement was truly in place from the start or whether at first it only applied to local elections for the Podestà (city magistrate); however, in reputation at least, Corsica has always been known as the place where female suffrage began. To that end it has an iconic place in the ideological mythology of the Cythereans as well as so many other groups.
At first the republican rebels only held the countryside while the Genoese still held the coastal cities, including the largest city of Ajaccio; to that end, the Republic was based in the inland city of Corte. As well as the Diet being based there, according to Enlightenment principles a university was also chartered there. While the University of Corte had a few false starts, it went on to be one of the most famous educational institutions in the world, principally because—again—it was the first university to admit women, albeit only for certain specialist subjects, in 1821.
The Genoese continued to suffer reversals throughout the 1750s and 60s, distracted by the Wars of Supremacy squeezing the trade that was their lifeblood, with Corsica increasingly being seen as an unprofitable running sore. In 1764 the last cities were taken and the Genoese expelled from the island altogether, but it was not until three years later when the Corsicans manned a makeshift navy and seized the island of Capraia—which had been Genoese since the sixteenth century—that the Gran Consiglio of Genoa could see the writing on the wall. To that end, Genoa sold the island to the Kingdom of France, which embarked on a campaign against the Republic. At least Genoa won back Capraia for the moment, while France invaded Corsica in 1768 and had completed the conquest of much of the island within a year—though, again, Paoli’s republican rebels continued to hold the interior and kept up a Kleinkrieg against the occupiers.[2] Although France had a much larger and better trained military than Genoa, she found the island no easier to completely subdue and found that Paoli’s republican ideals filtered back to France through the soldiers stationed there. Thus Corsica, along with the UPSA later on, was the major source of radical ideas circulating through France and in particular the military: greatly important, for if the French regiments had remained unquestionably loyal to the King, the Revolution would have been impossible.
The French occupation of Corsica, though brief from the perspective of history, left several significant effects upon the island. The man history knows as Charles Bone, who had been Paoli’s secretary during the Republic, fled the island for Britain along with the rest of his family, then known as the ‘Buonapartes’. Who can guess how history might have played out if Bone had decided to stay and his son Leo had grown up in Corsica? Perhaps he would have been a great president or war leader of the Republic: still, it is hard to see how he could have matched the epic achievements of the man we know not only to have scored victories for Britain but to have dominated and reformed France.
And of course it was through this man that Corsica regained her independence. When the Revolution came to France in 1794, the ideals that had been born in Corsica were expanded and taken to extremes by the Jacobins. The city of Toulon was held by the Royalist Admiral d’Estaing, who sent part of his fleet to Corsica to bring back supplies to help the city hold out against the Revolutionary army of General Custine. But the knowledge of where they were going sparked Revolutionary sentiment among the crews of those ships, and many mutinied. Some turned to ‘Democratic Piracy’ and were still randomly raiding any nation’s ships in the name of the Revolution as late as 1800, but the majority beached their craft on Corsica and deserted. With them they brought news of the Revolution, and it was while indulging in an ‘exploratory action’[3] of his old homeland that Captain Leo Bone observed the start of a complicated three-way conflict between the Revolutionary mutineers, the loyalists among the French stationed in Ajaccio, and Paoli’s old republicans who took advantage of the chaos to return from the interior and try to reclaim the island.
Bone, of course, used the knowledge from his observations to pull off his famously audacious gamble in persuading Admiral d’Estaing to come over to the British with his fleet, pre-empting the actual alliance between Britain and the royalist remnants. He also achieved contact with the ageing Paoli, using their familial connection to help achieve his goals. The Royal Navy, which now thought Bone could do no wrong, backed up Paoli’s men and helped them seize the island again, while at the same time declaring a protectorate over Malta. While Malta would eventually be handed over to the International Counter-Piracy Agency by bankrupt Britain in 1817, the Corsican Republic would continue to allow British ships to operate from its ports for the forseeable future: she became Britain’s biggest naval base in the Mediterranean.
The restored Republic weathered the Jacobin Wars well. When the Royal Navy sold off large numbers of its ships after Charles James Fox came to power in 1800, the Diet voted to buy three fifth- and sixth-rate frigates to form the core of a proper navy. She was also able to attract numerous ex-Royal Navy sailors who had been paid off. There are even unconfirmed claims that President Paoli hoped to tempt Leo Bone into becoming Admiral of the Fleet for his ancestral homeland, though of course in the event Bone was catapulted into a position of power in France instead. Those first three ships were named Presidente, Salvi Regina and Republica, and the Corsicans quickly threw them into action against Algerine pirates, building up experience and letting their foreign advisors become integrated with their inexperienced native sailors. Corsica would later become an important contributor to the ICPA.
Corsica’s willingness to fight and alliance with Britain helped protect them during the wars. Lisieux had little interest in the island, except in that it could be the source of conflicting ideology, but that was what mass control of all forms of media was for preventing, was it not? In any case, Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Minorca in 1803 torpedoed any serious Republican French presence in the Mediterranean until the days of Le Grand Crabe. Corsica’s apparently charmed existence met with natural resentment from other countries, and propaganda from the Hapsburgs in particular claimed that the island republic was deliberately allowed its independence by the Republican French, painting them as both inspiration for and collaborators with the Jacobins, and complicit in all their crimes de guerre. The Corsicans’ concern over this only increased when the former Italian Latin Republic fell into Hapsburg hands in the latter stages of the Jacobin Wars and became the Kingdom of Italy. With the Hapsburgs now in control of the old territory of Genoa, there was always the possibility that King Ferdinand could decide to stake a claim on Corsica, and Britain by now was too weak and self-absorbed to be relied upon if it came to war. In order to combat the Hapsburg threat, the Corsicans pursued alliances with foes of the Hapsburgs like the Sardinians, the Neapolitans and, more theoretically, the Concert of Germany. It was the first of these that proved the most complex of the relationships.
Sardinia had had a somewhat complicated history. In the early Middle Ages it had been ruled by small native kingdoms, the giudicari or ‘judicaries’, so called because they were descended from Byzantine judges who had seized control over the island after the Empire pulled out in the ninth century. Though several Italian republics including Genoa and Pisa had minor possessions in the island, it was these giudicari that dominated into the 1400s. Sardinia was gradually conquered by Aragon after the Pope proclaimed a “Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica” under Aragonese rule in 1297. (It is worth noting that Corsica was never actually part of this kingdom except on paper, but the historical precedent became important later). Aragon entered personal union with Castile in 1469, forming what is generally known as Spain, although the two would not be formally subsumed into one state until much later. In 1506 Spain, and therefore Sardinia, became a Hapsburg possession; the island was considered to remain with the Spanish Hapsburgs after the abdication of Charles V split the Hapsburg dominions into Spanish and Austrian portions. However, with the extinction of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the War of the Spanish Succession ending with a Bourbon on the Spanish throne, Sardinia was transferred to the Austrian Hapsburgs as part of the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the war in 1713. By this point Sardinia had acquired something of a reputation as being the possession nobody wanted, being viewed as poor, plague-ridden and backward.
As another consequence of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke of Savoy Victor Amadeus II had received Sicily, which as a kingdom elevated him to kingly rank as he desired. But this situation did not last long: during the War of the Quadruple Alliance soon afterwards, the Austrians were able to threaten Victor Amadeus into swapping Sardinia for Sicily in exchange for their help against the Spanish (who, incidentally, were also invading Sardinia in the course of the war). Victor Amadeus tried to wriggle out of this promise later on, but in the end Savoy was forced to yield Sicily and take on Sardinia. Not that the Hapsburg possession of Sicily lasted long, either: soon Sicily and Naples would be under Spanish Bourbon rule after the War of the Austrian Succession.
Therefore Sardinia had a recent history of being treated as a particularly low-grade bargaining chip in the Wars of Supremacy. Things changed however with the Jacobin Wars. France invaded and conquered the House of Savoy’s continental possessions, and King Charles Emmanuel IV managed to escape to Sardinia. He ruled in exile from the capital of Cagliari.[4] Being realistic, Charles Emmanuel knew there was no way to reclaim Piedmont himself with the meagre resources he had, and also knew that the best way to regain it would be to support the winning side as much as he could and position himself to claim that a Piedmont under his rule would make a useful buffer state.[5] Like the Corsicans to his north, he mostly supported the British naval forces in the Mediterranean, and also the Neapolitans to some extent. However in the end Britain was severely weakened by the French invasion of 1807 and was in no position to make claims at the Congress of Copenhagen of this type, and Naples though more sympathetic was also unable to dislodge the Hapsburgs from Piedmont as part of their Kingdom of Italy. So the House of Savoy was reduced to this single, poor island that nobody wanted.
Charles Emmanuel IV died in 1814 (some say of a broken heart) and was succeeded by his son Victor Felix I.[6] While Charles Emmanuel had been a realist, Victor Felix was less so. Named optimistically—‘lucky triumph’—he constantly had the humiliation of his House in mind and his passion was intriguing in Continental politics, trying to find a place for the House of Savoy to wedge its boot into the door. His own disdain for his poor island kingdom was no secret, provoking resentment among the Sardinian people that did not go unnoted by their Corsican neighbours.
And it was also in this time that Corsica had its most celebrated visitor...
*
From – “Great Political Figures of the Last Three Centuries” by Michael P. Lamb (1987) –
Henri Phillipe de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (a.k.a. ‘Henri Rouvroy’), 1761-1827.[7] One of the most influential figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though he lived much of his life in the eighteenth. Born into an aristocratic French family, a younger branch of the Dukes of Saint-Simon, he was a true Renaissance man as well as a Revolutionary one, conceiving grand schemes such as the Nicaragua Canal a century[8] before their construction. He appears to have embraced radical ideas from a young age, though perhaps a better word is ‘outrageous’. In his twenties, against the wishes of his family, he signed up for the French army and served as an ensign and lieutenant in the Duke of Noailles’ army in the Second Platinean War. Rouvroy was part of the French army in Buenos Aires to surrender at the end of the war, and it is believed that he considered staying there, having become excited by the republican ideals of the new nation. However he decided to return to France and became part of various radical clubs. He enthusiastically embraced the Revolution in 1794, and it is here that his part in later history would be defined.
Rouvroy witnessed Le Diamant speaking and even his death in the confusion of the mob as panicky soldiers and Sans-Culottes opened fire. According to Rouvroy’s account, which is disputed, Le Diamant was actually shot by someone in the crowd; however, Rouvroy himself acknowledged that he was towards the back of the rambunctious crowd and could not see very clearly. Rouvroy disowned his aristocratic background and joined the Jacobins, becoming a member of the National Legislative Assembly. Somehow he managed to survive Robespierre’s early purges and, still hungry for adventure, joined General Hoche’s campaign in Italy. Because of this, he was out of the country when the Double Revolution meant Lisieux took over, and stayed with Hoche in the Italian Latin Republic. Lisieux viewed Rouvroy as a potential threat: he was intent on rewriting the history of the early Revolution to minimise the role of Le Diamant, and he did not need any inconvenient witnesses about. He had managed to track down most of those who still lived who had been there that day and had them dealt with, but Rouvroy was a high-profile irritant. It appears that Rouvroy went to his death unaware that Lisieux had paid for assassins to remove him while in Italy—an unusual move for Lisieux who usually viewed death as a crass waste, and showing how much Lisieux feared his existence. Rouvroy survived the assassination attempts, which he was convinced were all attacks on someone else, such as Hoche: his natural humility comes through in all his writings.
Rouvroy first became disillusioned with the Revolution after witnessing the Rape of Rome. Though only a lapsed Catholic himself, he had seen enough of Le Diamant’s speeches to know that the great man himself would have been horrified at these actions against the Pope and the people of Rome. He would later write: “This simple truth, of seeing the Sans-Culottes rampage over the city like a latter-day version of Alaric’s Goths[9] and knowing that the man whose name they chanted would have turned away from them in shame, revealed to me how insidious matters can be when the adherents of an idea take it to a place without control. It came to me then that all the abuses we had seen under the ancien regime, all the corruption of the nobles and the priests, was one and the same as what I now saw: ideas for ruling that had been good and honest to begin with, but had been twisted and corrupted by fallible men. I realised that we had thrown the baby out with the bathwater, dismissing things such as religion and alienating their adherents when we were just as guilty of using our beliefs as a means to an end and committing grievous crimes in the process.”
This revelation would go on to inform Rouvroy’s later works. In the short term, however, he remained with Hoche when the general was forced to return to France after the Hapsburgs and Neapolitans rolled up his Republic. Though Lisieux reluctantly accepted Hoche back, Rouvroy was quickly clapped in irons. It is uncertain why Lisieux did not just kill him at this stage: some biographers suggest that Lisieux believed in some mystical manner that the reason why his earlier assassins had failed was precisely because he had stepped away from his usual doctrine of the sanctity of life, and therefore he must appease whatever gods he believed in. This is debatable, but what is known is that Rouvroy was enslaved as part of a work gang constructing more Surcouf-class steam-galleys in Toulon. The work was deliberately hard and designed ultimately to kill its workers after extracting every last bit of use the Administration could get from them, but Rouvroy still had his spirit and grimly survived. He was nonetheless at the end of his tether when Nelson’s Corsican-Neapolitan forces attacked Toulon in 1807 and he, along with the rest of the surviving slaves, were set free. It was here that he encountered Corsicans for the first time, as he would later recount.
Due to the chaos in France, Rouvroy initially went to Naples and lived under an assumed name, at one point going to Rome and going through the first confession since he was a young man, speaking of his part in the burning of the city several years before. It is, however, apocryphal that the priest that heard his confession was the future Pope Innocent XIV. Rouvroy returned to France in 1810, racing to Paris where General Boulanger faced the allied forces, including the turncoat republicans under Bourcier, in the last great battle of the Jacobin Wars. “It is well that I did not arrive until the matter was decided,” he wrote in his diary, “as I still am uncertain which side I would have joined.” In the aftermath of the battle and the foundation of the new Kingdom, Rouvroy joined Bourcier’s parti de la liberté, commonly known as the Rouges, and was soon elected to the Grand-Parlement as a deputy. Rouvroy both admired and despised Bonaparte, rapidly becoming frustrated with Bonaparte’s ability to govern as Prime Minister despite his parti modéré (or Bleus) not even being the largest party in the Hemicycle.[10] Rouvroy advocated to Bourcier that they seize on particular issues to try and divide Bonaparte’s Bleus in the hope of building their own power. Bourcier, however, said that doing so ran the risk of a large part of the Bleus joining with the parti royaliste or Blancs to keep the Rouges out. Better for the Rouges to bide their time and build their power within Bonaparte’s system, Bourcier said.
Naturally, the dynamic Rouvroy felt stifled under this and had several public disagreements with Bourcier, alienating parts of the Rouge party. In the end Rouvroy decided he had better take some time away from the Parlement to allow tempers to cool. He took advantage of the fact that Bonaparte was going to Britain in 1813 for his father’s funeral, and seized this time to go on his own foreign trip, which he called “A pilgrimage to the cradle of republicanism”. He was going to Greece.
In 1813 Rouvroy was fifty-two years old, and British diarist and poet John Byron III (q.v.) was only 26. Nonetheless the two of them got along like a house on fire when they met in Athens in early 1814. Both men had come with similar aims, though Byron was more interested in the architecture and art (and the women...) then politics. And both left in disappointment. It was the calm before the storm, with people across the Ottoman Empire (accurately) feeling that all hell would break loose as soon as Dalmat Melek Pasha died. Byron and Rouvroy witnessed several early riots and risings by angry Greeks in their time in the region and were not impressed. “It is the firmly held belief of romantics in our nation, and many others, that the people of Greece under the Turkish yoke are the same noble masters of the arts and the sciences who lived before Christ and inspired our own civilisation. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. The current inhabitants of the region we name Greece are nothing more than another gang of Slavic savages, quite interchangeable with the Servs or the Bulgars,” Byron wrote scathingly; some have suggested his particular distaste for the Greeks may have been due to contracting gonorrhea from a lady of Lepanto. Rouvroy was similar in his views: “He who goes on a pilgrimage for republicanism would be wise to avoid its cradle, for the baby was long ago thrown out and all that remains are his filthy couches-culottes,” he wrote. Both men published well-received books describing their travels that went on to have what scholars agree to be a significant impact on popular European views of the Ottoman Time of Troubles a few years later. Not everything the two writers said was negative: both expressed admiration for the Albanian highlanders who the local Ottoman authorities deployed to crush the local rioters. Byron compared them to the highlanders from the Scotland of his childhood, right down to their choice of kilts as battle dress: savage and uncouth but fine, uncorruptible warriors.[11]
It is believed that his friendship with Byron led Rouvroy to improve his writing style, becoming more amenable and engrossing for the casual reader, which doubtless helped his later career. Byron also may have inspired Rouvroy’s mild anti-industrialism, with Byron having left Britain partly because he was in trouble for defending John Sutcliffe’s machine-breakers in the face of the Churchill regime’s authoritarian response.[12] Rouvroy would mainly express this in later life through his wandering, almost poetic interludes praising the rural beauty of the Corsican countryside.
Rouvroy returned to France after hearing of the assassination of King Louis XVII. By the time he arrived, of course, everything had died down. Bourcier had been hanged by the mob from a gas-light, Bonaparte had seized power as Regent over the young King Charles X, and Aumont and Barras had been exiled to Louisiana. Essentially all the political parties had been decapitated. Rouvroy seized the opportunity to try and become leader of the chaos that had been the Rouge Party.
There was no formal procedure for electing a leader, so Rouvroy invented one and it was approved. However, in the actual contest, Rouvroy faced Pierre Artaud. Artaud had been a close ally of Bourcier, a former Sans-Culottes organiser, and was a nasty piece of work in the same vein as the late General Lascelles. Though everyone could see that Artaud would be a disaster as leader, he was able to intimidate enough Rouge deputies into supporting him and Rouvroy lost the vote. He swiftly left the country again—whether out of disgust or out of fear that Artaud wouldn’t stop there is unknown—and Artaud predictably led the Rouges to disorganisation and the electoral wilderness while Bonaparte reigned supreme.
Rouvroy decided his next—and last, as it turned out—exile would be in what he dubbed the cradle of the modern republic, Corsica. He instantly fell in love with the island and its quiet radicalism. By this point women were unambiguously permitted to vote in Diet and Presidential elections and Rouvroy was fascinated by a point that no Jacobin had ever thought to raise. Only a few of his works can really be said to be Cytherean in nature but he did have some influence over the movement when it rose to prominence.
But, of course, Rouvroy is best known for being the founder of Adamantianism. He was first inspired to write his greatest work when speaking to two Frenchmen of a similar age, both of whom were mutineers who had escaped Admiral d’Estaing’s fleet for the island back in 1795 and had lived here ever since. They reflected to him that they had only heard about the Revolution by report in the first place, neither of them really knew anything about Le Diamant or its origins, and now few people remained who knew anything at all, what with Lisieux’s largely successful extirpation of all records about the man. Rouvroy became depressed and then decided to dedicate the remainder of his life to ensuring at least one personal record existed. He wrote numerous books about the history of the Revolution, but of course his best-known work is the book generally known by the short form of its Latin title: Cor Adamantis, or Heart of Diamond. This was primarily intended as a rough biography of Le Diamant, or at least Rouvroy’s reminiscences of the man. Though Rouvroy knew little and his painstaking research revealed little more, the work is nonetheless still considered to be the best of what few sources exist on that enigmatic, inadvertent architect of the modern world.
Almost by accident while writing the book, Rouvroy ended up discussing the political views he himself had grown to have over the years. He wrote of his horror at the Rape of Rome and his disgust at how authoritarian regimes as in Austria and Britain had used the excesses of the Revolution as an excuse to clamp down and sweep away what reforms had been made under Enlightenment liberals. “Do not look to the France of the past for a model of republicanism,” he wrote. “Look to the UPSA, yes; but also look to Corsica. Here a republican system has been maintained for more than half a century, with none of the excess we have known to our regret. For all this people’s reputation for vendetta, no Corsican President ever ordered the building of a phlogisticateur with which to murder his people on a whim. No-one ever burned a church simply because it was a church, and because of that, the small deistic-atheist minority can raise a Temple to Reason without much fear of the same happening in kind. Many of the people here are Jansenists now, and it is a faith I find myself increasingly drawn to: preserving the core precepts of Christianity brought down through the ages, but dismissive of the temporal power of a prince in Rome.[13] At its heart, this is a manner of government where laws are enacted not for the sake of fulfilling some ideological goal, but because there is a general agreement that they are needed to improve the lives of all. It is, I feel, a manner of government that Le Diamant would have looked upon and smiled in approval.”
Rouvroy was by this point already acknowledged as the greatest authority on Le Diamant, and this bold claim held more water than it would have if made by any other author. After being asked by philosophers to expand on his political views—in his twilight years Rouvroy also took on a position at the University of Corte lecturing on political philosophy—Rouvroy wrote several more works on the subject, and it is from these that the ideology he created was defined. Its name, however, came from that first book: Adamantianism, or the Adamantine Way: the way Le Diamant would have wanted it. Adamantianism, like any other ideology, has of course had many schisms and disagremeents and different schools of thought over the years. However, its core precepts have not changed. Adamantianism stands for government of moderation, government of principle, government of pragmatism. It stands for consensus where possible and gentlemanly disagreement where not. It seeks the pursuit of progressive goals from within the system: Rouvroy criticised previous attempts at reform from below as being at one or the other extreme of a scale. “The peasant revolters of the past took the king’s word on trust and then happily returned to their farms to be slaughtered; the revolutionaries of the present day want to kill every man who has ever had pretensions to any class above the lowest of the low. Let the reformers of the lower class confront the ruling elite, within the system wherever possible but outside it if not, and let them wield an iron fist in a velvet glove: do not threaten the elite without cause, but let them know that they face consequences if they dismiss such protests.”
The clarifications expressed in the later works have helped define modern Adamantianism more precisely. Though Rouvroy was a republican all his life, he wrote that it was better to achieve progressive goals for the lower classes within a constitutional monarchy than to seek its overthrow by violent revolution that had the change of producing a tyrant like Lisieux. He believed republics were always preferable to monarchies, but not at the cost of an ocean of blood, and wrote that ‘Adamantianism’ was compatible with constitutional monarchy: indeed, Le Diamant had sought reform by that means. Rouvroy attempted to replicate Le Diamant’s original “La Carte” from memory – which Lisieux had tried, mostly with success, to have every copy destroyed and altered forgeries produced to confuse the matter. He also made his own version to better fit a modern and worldwide vision, applicable to any country rather than just France. Rouvroy’s Carte set out the goals of any Adamantine movement in order, starting with seeking a representative, elected assembly, then seeking to expand its powers, then enacting laws to better the lot of the poor, and so on.
Rouvroy died even as the Popular Wars broke out, but while Adamantianism would be an important factor within that conflict, it would continue to be one of the most influential ideologies in the world to the present day.
[1] And in OTL the Presidency of the USA.
[2] The term is, obviously, used anachronistically, much as one might hear the actions of Americans during the American Revolutionary War described as ‘guerilla warfare’ in OTL.
[3] I.e. espionage.
[4] Also happened in OTL during the Napoleonic Wars.
[5] Also happened in OTL, but successfully.
[6] OTL, Charles Emmanuel IV had no children and, after the death of his wife in 1802, he abdicated the throne and was succeeded by his brother as Victor Emmanuel I. In TTL though his political fortunes are less fortunate his personal ones are more so.
[7] An ATL brother of OTL’s Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. Born some years after the POD, so not the same person, but had the same parents and upbringing so is somewhat comparable. Note that in OTL he abbreviated his name to ‘Henri de Saint-Simon’ – the different contraction he chooses here reflects different usage on the part of the different Revolution here.
[8] AH Cliché #12403523, check.
[9] Who sacked Rome in AD 410.
[10] Like OTL, the French Grand-Parlement is based on a hemicycle rather than opposing benches as in the Westminster system. Unlike OTL, what we would call the political right sits on the left of the hemicycle and vice-versa, but right and left are not used as political terms in TTL anyway.
[11] OTL’s Byron made this same observation, and it is responsible for Albanian national dress having been somewhat hijacked by Greece in OTL.
[12] John Sutcliffe is the TTL equivalent of Ned Ludd (if he existed) and Luddite machine-breakers in TTL are referred to as Sutcliffists. OTL’s Byron also defended the Luddites. Rouvroy’s position here is very different to that of the OTL Saint-Simon, who enthusiastically endorsed the idea of an industrial civilisation built on scientific principles.
[13] This is a slightly milder version of OTL Saint-Simon’s views on Christianity: he advocated the dismissal of all structure and a return to a personal relationship with God.
~~~
Comments?
Thande
Corsica surviving as an independent polity is a very interesting bit, not to mention the House of Savoy (hehehe...) wanting their home territories back.
And a nice view on Saint-Simon.
And a nice view on Saint-Simon.
Thande
Donor
Thanks. As for sociology, it'll be very different in TTL: one of the major changes between OTL and TTL is that Mentianism, which more or less takes the place of OTL socialism, is much less a "scientific" movement and is not based so much on a sociological framework. What is based on a sociological framework is...well, the clue's in the name.
I've just finished writing an essay on avant-gardism the referenced Saint-Simon before I read this - interesting coincidence, or LTTW invading real life by way of L-Space?
I love that Doc Wostyn feels the need to tell us he won't be making any more introductions, rather than just getting on with it - not that I think it's particularly like Hendryk... (if anything, I think it's more like me!)
Pleasant, propserous Corsican Republic - always a good thing. This means you're going to break it now, aren't you?
So Adamantianism comes from Le Diamant - I've been trying to work out what metal it represented (yes, yes, I know. I blame X-Men and Harvest Moon. You go shush now). Rouvroy seems to have a bit of the Orwellian about him (that is, in terms of optimistic political manifestoing, not dystopic fictional Communsim).
Excellent as ever, and a nice change from the harbingers of doom that we've been seeing so far in Part Three. Not that I don't like the foreshadowing stuff; it's just that the more optimistic ending suited the mood I'm currently in. And the very real lack of sleep deprivation thing, let's not forget that.
I love that Doc Wostyn feels the need to tell us he won't be making any more introductions, rather than just getting on with it - not that I think it's particularly like Hendryk... (if anything, I think it's more like me!)
Pleasant, propserous Corsican Republic - always a good thing. This means you're going to break it now, aren't you?
So Adamantianism comes from Le Diamant - I've been trying to work out what metal it represented (yes, yes, I know. I blame X-Men and Harvest Moon. You go shush now). Rouvroy seems to have a bit of the Orwellian about him (that is, in terms of optimistic political manifestoing, not dystopic fictional Communsim).
Excellent as ever, and a nice change from the harbingers of doom that we've been seeing so far in Part Three. Not that I don't like the foreshadowing stuff; it's just that the more optimistic ending suited the mood I'm currently in. And the very real lack of sleep deprivation thing, let's not forget that.
Thande
Donor
I was wondering if anyone would get that
I originally wrote 'got along famously', then verbally backspaced and realised there was a far more relevant aphorism
Thande
Donor
It did in OTL. The difference is the Republic survives.
I'm drawing up some diagrams to show how the different parliaments are laid out, although some will have to wait for later segments so as not to be spoilerrific. The first one (as I'm used to drawing it) is the composition of the British Parliament.
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