Part #210: E Quartus Unum
“Sorry but I’ve got to make this deal love, I know Angie will be disappointed but if she wants to go to university in the ENA then those fees don’t pay themselves. If Zénith gets the contract for the engines on the new FlyIng beamdrome then a few shares in a Bavarian bank account might just happen to be misplaced, AW? Love, DBH.”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
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From – “Forgotten Wars” by Charlotte Eisenfeld and Davide Barozzi (1987, authorised English translation 1992)—
The Peninsular War is perhaps the best known (though certainly not the only) conflict to interrupt the so-called ‘Long Peace’ generally defined as lasting from 1854 to 1896. The higher profile of the Peninsular War is doubtless because it interrupted the peace of Western Europe, and even in an age when that region was losing its relative importance in world affairs with the rise of the New World Powers, in the eyes of many it continued to define the pivot about which world affairs should be considered. If Western Europe was at peace, so too was the world, as far as this inward-looking and chauvinistic worldview was concerned. Despite this description, however, the Peninsular War still qualifies as a ‘forgotten war’ in terms of the relative lack of detailed knowledge or discussion of the conflict one finds outside Italy itself.
To an extent the war was a ‘missed opportunity’, if that is not a highly bloodthirsty term to use in this context, for a global war like the Great American War or the Pandoric War—the two which bracket the Long Peace—to break out. Indeed, at the time many commentators believed that, with the ongoing turmoil in Carolina and increasing French hostility to the ‘German project’, the world in the 1860s was a powder keg waiting only for a spark to send it right back into the indecisive battles of less than twenty years earlier.
Therefore, the remarkable thing about the Peninsular War is not that it interrupted the Long Peace but that, fundamentally, it failed to: there was no escalation, despite some deliberate attempts to fan the flames by the Tuileries[1] and others. This damp squib was primarily due to the fact that the French government had begun to believe its own propaganda about German unification. During the Rouge premiership of François Resnais—who enjoyed a parliamentary majority from 1859 to 1864 and then was reduced to a minority government—the opposition Verts, first under Georges Villon and then the rambunctious Alain Tourneur, had continuously attacked the government on the issue of national security and the threat of ‘a nation called Germany’. This evoked Villon’s successful campaign in the 1840s which had attacked the military cuts of Malraux’s government and helped divide the soldiers, who had obtained in part thanks to the Rouges, from their benefactors.[2] The French press was already in a jittery mood following the Saxon—or German—conquest of Jutland and the streets seemed awash with florin bloodies about the terrifying German army invading any day now. This so-called ‘invasion literature’ also spread to other countries, notably Great Britain. In the 1870s it spread further and was often mutated to fit whatever the local bête noire nation was—with a much-debated case in scholarship of an 1882 Corean alarmist story about a Chinese invasion which nonetheless appears to be derived from one of these well-worn French accounts. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon was noted by the nascent Societist movement (though Sanchez himself would pass away before it spread much beyond France) and Raúl Caraíbas’
Critique of the Paranoid Man in 1873 would help cement his place as a leader of the then overlooked Sanchezistas.
And indeed, whatever criticism may be made of Sanchez, in the case of the invasion bloodies one of his theses—that a bourgeois group may seek to exploit and fan the flames of a proletarian outrage only to find themselves losing control of the tiger they sought to ride—played out as he had warned. The French military, resentful under Resnais’ frugal budgets and engaged in the nigh universal rivalry between Army and Navy as well as between many sub-factions within them, bombarded the government with demands for super-armourclads or personal protguns with accompanying frightening statistics that implied the Germans would take Paris the day after declaring war. Of course, those claims were at best based on wilful exaggeration if not wishful thinking, but as the Jacobin Wars and their
levée en masse receded into memory, fewer of the people making budgetary and diplomatic decisions had served in the military themselves and had little basis for judgement. A bold faction in society, nicknamed
voyous (aggressive scoundrels) by their enemies, argued that the only way France could stop the German threat was to launch a decisive attack or
martelée (literally ‘hammer blow’) to smash the project before a truly unified Germany would outmatch France in both men and resources. The
voyous were never truly in the ascendant, except perhaps in the press, but they enjoyed some influence over the Tourneur government. Nonetheless, few in France would seriously have contemplated the
voyou demand for a preemptive attack on Germany. It had been drilled heavily into the French national consciousness that a century of aggressive war—whether under the Bourbons or the Jacobins—had only led to a union of European nations against France and a continuing suspicion that France might revert to Jacobin ways overnight. While the wars that had sparked that tendency were receding into that foreign country called the past, the conviction remained. If France was to fight Germany, then the Germans must be seen as the aggressor.
What has all of this to do with a war in Italy? The invasion bloodies had worked their ill magic upon the people of France. All but a few shouted-down dissenting voices were convinced that Germany was only awaiting its moment to attack France: whether thanks to a desire to be the number one power in Europe, in an attempt to conquer territory such as Lorraine, or—as argued by the Noir party and others with unreconstructed Jacobin sympathies—simply because the Germanic race was intrinsically aggressive and warmongering. Therefore, it was considered perfectly logical that when presented with any opportunity to invade France—such as the escalation of a local war into a wider one through an alliance system—Germany would seize it. In an accident of history, the war in question happened to be the Peninsular War.
Since the Jacobin Wars, Italy—once a place with almost as many small states as the Holy Roman Empire, indeed an entity of which some parts of it had once been members—had become dominated by just two major powers. In the north was the Kingdom of Italy (generally called North Italy by historiographers), ultimately derived from the Italian Latin Republic of Lazare Hoche with the addition of a Hapsburg monarch: firstly the Archduke Ferdinand, then his son Leopold. Leopold in turn had two sons: Fernando Francisco, who had helped mastermind the Patrimonial War in the 1850s, and Leopoldo Rudolfo, who had fought in it only to find himself a captive. In the south was the Kingdom of the Three Sicilies (an informal name that had become official), derived from the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily together with Catalonia, the last remnant of the Kingdom of Aragon that had been separated from the Spanish crown in 1808 only to mostly be lost back to the Reconquista in 1832. Since that time Catalonia had been placed under the viceregal authority of Carlo III, deposed Grand Duke of Tuscany, who was still in office in 1867 at the age of 69.
The Three Sicilies were ruled by the descendants of Charles, second son of King Charles III of Spain: following his death in 1811 he was succeeded by Gennaro I and after eighteen years of reign Gennaro was in turn succeeded by his son Luigi I. Luigi governed with the aid of Leonardo Nelson, son of the great British-born Admiral Horatio Nelson who had fought for his grandfather, and also his younger brother Carlo Gennaro, Duke of Syracuse and a great general. He had a daughter, Carlotta Dorotea, and a son, Paolo Luigi.
Since 1810 or so the two powers had spent much of their time sizing each other up and engaging in battles, whether military or otherwise, for dominance of the Italian Peninsula. Tuscany and the Papal States often found themselves pawns to be fought over, changing hands or losing territory several times. By the time of the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1867, Tuscany was now an independent but North Italian-influenced republic under Giovanni Tressino, while Pope Innocent XIV had given up the Church of Rome’s temporal stake in the Patrimony of St Peter (sparking the Patrimonial War) and only a small remnant remained as the secular Roman Republic, the remainder having gone to the Three Sicilies. It was very clear to keen political observers across the Europe of the 1860s that it was only a matter of time before the two Italies engaged in yet another return engagement. However, when it came it would not take a form that any of those observers could have predicted, for there was one crucial fact that none of their elaborate theories and models took into account: love.
It was during the Patrimonial War that the runaway Princess Carlotta Dorotea had learned that Prince Leopoldo Rudolfo was secretly being held captive by Prospero Barberini, who was intriguing against her father and playing both sides off against one another. Together the two royals foiled the Barberini plot—and, quite incidentally, fell hopelessly in love with each other. Even William Shakespeare might admit that he had been upstaged when it came to engineering a pair of star-cross’d Italian lovers. It would not be the Houses of Montague and Capulet spilling blood over a single city, but the Houses of Hapsburg and of Bourbon doing so over an entire nation. And, if the French
voyous had their way, a world.
Naturally in the years following the meeting of Carlotta and Leopoldo, they were forced to communicate by clandestine means and snatch brief, secretive meetings with talk of invented diplomatic functions and unexplained absences from seaside breaks near the border that divided Italy. And, given that both Italies’ royal houses could afford excellent bodyguards—though several of them sympathised with the young man and woman—it was only a matter of time before the secret leaked out.
King Luigi was furious, incandescent. King Leopold on the other hand was both older and more seasoned and, more importantly, a Hapsburg. He might have pioneered the Italian Hapsburgs’ careful tendency to loudly proclaim their Italian-ness and officially disown any connexion with their relatives in Vienna, but he was still a Hapsburg. And, when facing an enemy, no member of the House of Hapsburg would ever contemplate grabbing a pistol from their desk drawer if there was a marriage license in the drawer below. This was not a disaster, it was an
opportunity. Granted, the fact that the prince and princess genuinely, almost sickeningly, loved each other was a bit of a worry, but such things could be dealt with.
Nonetheless, any optimistic Hapsburg views that the happenstance affair could be turned into a proper marriage alliance were overruled by Luigi’s intransigence and conviction that the whole business was the result of an elaborate Hapsburg entrapment plot. At times, possibly egged on by his brother (who had more of a visceral dislike of the North Italians thanks to his battlefield experiences), Luigi even conspiracised that the whole Barberini plot had been orchestrated by the Hapsburgs to bring Carlotta and Leopoldo together—as manifestly absurd as this was.
After rapidly cycling through all the predictable ways of preventing the Carlotta from communicating with or meeting her beau, Luigi resorted to drastic measures. He imprisoned her in solitary (albeit luxurious) confinement, and after a month told her that Leopoldo had married an Austrian Hapsburg archduchess only to die a week later in an accident. (This peculiar combination was likely the result of which lie to tell her being decided by committee). The King’s rather ill-thought-through plan was to ensure an emotional divorce from Leopoldo, get Carlotta married off and only then release her and tell her the truth. One can only imagine what would have happened had it reached this stage, but the reality was quite dark enough. On April 2nd 1862, one of Carlotta’s maids, Renata Matteucci, laboriously unlocked the door to her prison suite only to find the princess—now no flighty teenager but in her early thirties—dangling from the chandelier on a makeshift rope made of knotted-together blankets, an upturned stool still rocking back and forth beneath her feet.
The quick-thinking maid did not panic but realised that Carlotta had hanged herself mere seconds before, perhaps rushing the process after hearing Matteucci fumbling with the door locks. She quickly brought the nearest guard, Raffaele Ponti, who took a shot with his Roanne AA-2 revolving pistol and snapped the makeshift rope, bringing the purple-faced princess crashing to the floor (and incidentally leaving her with a lifelong limp). Nonetheless, the duo had saved their mistress’ life. In an earlier era we might never have known their names, but this was the enterprising Europe of the Long Peace, and both Ponti and Matteucci spent many years touring the continent under the auspices of the Roanne munitions company to share their story. Matteuci would play the part of Princess Carlotta and faux-hang herself so that Ponti could take his famous shot on stage and give a rather stilted spiel about the brilliant technological prowess of Roanne. (There remains a persistent urban myth that Matteuci met her death on stage in a botched example of this show, either shot by Ponti or strangled by a too-realistic hanging—in reality Matteuci eventually married Ponti, outlived him and died in her eighties in 1928 as a wealthy woman. It appears the misconception is derived from a popular film of the 1940s which involved circus performers whose act was similar to Ponti’s and Matteuci’s).
Princess Carlotta’s suicide attempt shocked her father to the core. A good Catholic, he did not blame her (as many, including his brother and son did), but rather himself for driving her to such depths of feelings. He fell ill for several days upon hearing the news and it is very likely that the emotional strain shortened his life. Nonetheless, when he could stand on his own two feet again, Luigi announced a change of heart. Carlotta would be permitted to marry Leopoldo. He found that his daughter’s happiness was more important to him than the security of his throne. And besides, neither of the two were heirs apparent: as his old enemy King Leopold argued, it was a useful diplomatic marriage without significantly affecting any succession issues.
That is, until...
As Mikhail Vytotsky would famously comment, the 1860s were a dangerous time if you were a European monarch. Though the biggest name to pass away in the era, Charles X of France, would not do so until 1871, many others would find their time on this mortal coil running out. King Leopold, already an octagenarian at the time of his second son’s marriage in 1863, passed away that same year and was succeeded by Fernando Francisco as Ferdinand II. While Ferdinand’s queen had yet to conceive, few could have foreseen that the succession could ever pass to his brother. But just two years after taking the throne, Ferdinand was slain in a grievous attack that shocked European society. His royal train—an innovation that was becoming increasingly common across Europe as the roads were too choked with steam-wagons—struck a bomb laid by a terrorist group known as Humanitas. The ensuing investigations were so choked with propaganda that it has baffled scholars’ attempts to get to the bottom of just what Humanitas stood for, with claims that they included Jacobin Hoche-cultists or Radical Mentians, Societists (unlikely), Venetian Communists,[3] Etruscan cultists, generic nativists or even secret societies that had been upset by Ferdinand’s tax policies. One thing that makes study of the incident so tricky is the upsurge of public anger against the group and the fact that anything and everything associated with them faced a tide of destruction in street riots—which, sadly, often extended to any of the usual suspects such as foreign traders or Jews.
As the smoke cleared and numerous enterprising gentlemen attempted to sell their patent steam-powered devices for cleaning blackened Duomos to city governments across North Italy, one thing became clear. The grieving Leopoldo Rudolfo had been catapulted to the throne as Leopold II at the age of forty. And he was married to the daughter of the man whom history said should be his enemy.
Even that, perhaps, would not have led to war. But in that same bleak year of 1865, the Duke of Syracuse also passed away aged sixty-two, officially from pneumonia but possibly through complications from syphilis. King Luigi mourned his younger brother, but became increasingly concerned on one specific consequence of the Duke’s death. For the past two decades and more, every time Luigi had become concerned with the prospects of his son Paolo Luigi—his poor health, his vindictive attitude towards tutors and servants, his lack of educational prowess—he had always been reassured by Carlo Gennaro’s confident praise of the boy and the knowledge that the experienced if sometimes bellicose Duke would serve as Regent if Luigi predeceased him. Having been resentful of his own informal Regent, Francis Philip, in the early days of his reign, Luigi thought it far better for his son to have a man he clearly liked and respected in the role.
But now there could be no such Regency. And, forced to confront his son without the filters that the Duke had placed between them, Luigi had to face a fact he found almost as painful as when he had learned of his daughter’s suicide attempt.
Paolo Luigi, Hereditary Prince of Naples and Duke of Calabria, was simply not up to the job.
If King Luigi truly cared about his crown, he could not pass it to his son: to the young man who he privately began to suspect was not, in fact, his blood son. He had loved his Flemish wife Queen Amalia Theodora , but Luigi had kept mistresses as well and had always suspected she had her lovers. Paolo Luigi had looked enough like Luigi himself to reassure his suspicions, but what if his father had been Carlo Gennaro? It would certainly explain the Duke’s attachment to a boy whom, Luigi now began to see, possessed a character which Carlo Gennaro would normally have treated with contempt.
But what could he do? Paolo Luigi was his only son.
His only
son...
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The Peninsular War broke out in 1867 with the death of King Luigi I of the Three Sicilies and, more specifically, with his alleged deathbed Pragmatic Sanction that disinherited his son Paolo Luigi as a bastard and, in defiance of the former system of Salic Law as applied in the Neapolitan realms, passed the crown to his daughter Carlotta Dorotea as Queen Regnant. As she was married to King Leopold II of North Italy, this effectively united the Italian peninsula as a form of dual monarchy. There were many at the time (and not a few modern historians) who found the circumstances of the Pragmatic Sanction rather suspicious, and when Paolo Luigi declared it a falsehood and the legitimacy of his succession, he found support from many, not least many in the military thanks to his uncle (or possibly father) Syracuse’s legacy. Before it was even one nation, therefore, Italy faced a civil war. The war is sometimes also called the War of Italian Unification, but this was not explicitly the issue over which the conflict was fought: the true political union of the kingdoms would not be contemplated until after the war was already resolved.
As noted above, the remarkable part about the Peninsular War was that it did not escalate. The French government announced support for the North Italians and Carlotta loyalists, openly sending military aid and occasionally aiding in false flag naval operations (most notably at the Battle of Salina in 1868, in which most of Paolo’s navy was sunk). The French assumed that the Germans would seize this opportunity to back the other side and escalate to a direct war between the powers. In fact, in the real world away from self-sustaining French alarmism, the young Germany was still struggling with its own internal divisions. The
Kulturkrieg had not truly begun, but the Emperor and Bundesdiet were already facing problems such as the mutiny of troops in Swabia against the rotation system. (Which, it is worth briefly digressing to point out, was certainly
not the inspiration for the Societist Zonal Rotation, as is often claimed: not only was the German method merely a refinement of an ancient practice, but Sanchez had already written about the Zonal Rotation idea years before—ironically, in the original published edition of
Pax Aeterna, considering it only to reject it as unfeasible).
Germany’s diplomatic response was therefore limited to an extremely vague statement of the type that could be taken to be an act of support for either side, depending on which won, and a few confused protests about the buildup of French troops in Lorraine. Alain Tourneur remained convinced the Germans were about to invade for the next three years, only for the French people—rather fed up of ‘temporary war taxes’ to finance a war that was entirely failing to materialise—to throw away their invasion bloodies and vote him out in 1870 in favour of Louis Bouchez’s Rouges. Tourneur would spend much of his retirement writing rambling, self-centred memoirs in which he accused the Germans of playing an elaborate trick in which they had had the barefaced cheek to avoid declaring war purely to ruin his political career.
The Peninsular War therefore remained localised. Paolo’s side never obtained the level of official support from a nation that Carlotta’s did from France, but he was sold weapons, other materiel and the services of mercenaries by a number of powers. First among these were the vigorous new Ottoman Empire, stretching its hand across the Mediterranean, while an even more unexpected reappearance on the world stage was that of Great Britain. For the first time in over thirty years, the British government began to interfere in Mediterranean politics ‘east of Gibraltar’. In the eyes of many, this was a deliberate statement that the British were finally ready to drop their longtime isolation from European political affairs. Ironically, this shift would proceed to distract the Tuileries in the following years when the Germans actually did begin some policies that in the earlier powder keg environment would have been considered impossibly provocative.
However, as both Briton and Turk were likely certain from the start, Paolo’s side was doomed to failure. Not only was he an uninspiring ruler wracked with legitimacy issues, but he could claim the support of only part of the Three Sicilies’ people, whereas his opponent not only possessed the rest but also the support of her husband’s undivided North Italy. In 1869 Paolo finally fled the Calabria whose dukedom he had long held and holed up in Sicily. The Ottomans did at least profit indirectly from the conflict, as it was at this point that the longstanding rebellion in Neapolitan Tunis was able to finally succeed against their distracted and divided masters, and in 1875 Tunis would formally return to the Ottoman fold.
With Paolo’s withdrawal to Sicily, the French belatedly recovered from their embarrassment and began intervening more constructively in the Mediterranean. At the Treaty of Rome (1870) Paolo was allowed to remain as King of an independent Sicily—which rapidly became something of a criminals’ paradise with the involvement of British, French and North African groups as well as the island’s own gangs. With the abrupt decline of Barbary piracy, smuggling rapidly took over. Sicily received a reputation as a place where one could purchase anything in the world, a reputation that outlasted Paolo when he was overthrown in 1891 and the Sicilian Republic was declared—modelled on the Corsican and Sardinian Republics, with which it would eventually join to form the Tyrrhenian Union. Catalonia (including the Balearics) was formally split off as a separate kingdom, with Carlo III’s three decades of viceregal service being rewarded by upgrading him to a King. There was some speculation at the time about whether the French might try to annex Catalonia directly, or return it to Spain which was now a close ally, but nothing came of this.
As for the rest, continental Italy was now effectively united for the first time since the eighth century, a thousand years earlier. Centuries of internal conflict had come to an end—at least, the form of conflict that involved bullets and bombs, as the political sphere was quite willing to step into the breech. While Naples, not particularly enamoured of Paolo after the late conflict, was willing to follow Carlotta, its people were highly suspicious of the idea of marching to a North Italian tune. If Italy was to be truly politically then the two would have to be regarded as equal partners. And what of Tuscany and the Roman Republic?
In 1873 the Treaty of Florence was signed. The North Italians were convinced it was far too lenient to the Neapolitans and the Neapolitans believed it was a power grab by the North Italians. As such, it was probably as fair a document as could be expected. The capital of the new United Kingdom of Italy would not rest in Turin, nor in Naples the city, but in Rome, the ancient capital and now neutral ground. Unlike the Neo-Etruscan romantics of thirty years before, enthusiasm for the Idea of Italy was now transferred to emulating the Romans. Leopold and Carlotta would rule the country jointly, and their children would succeed to a single throne. (And much to the relief of those who had had quite enough of succession wars, Leopold and Carlotta had no fewer than six children).
A powerful new nation had thus been added to the chessboard of Europe. And if this was a destabilising factor in some ways, it is possible to look at it in others: perhaps it was the unexpected intrusion of a second unification that drew eyes away from the slow and difficult teenage years of united Germany...
[1] The Palais des Tuileries was demolished under the Administration of Lisieux in TTL and eventually replaced with a new complex of government buildings, the most important of which being the headquarters of the French Foreign Ministry. In TTL that institution is thus often informally referred to as ‘the Tuileries’, in the same way that in OTL it is often called ‘the Quai d’Orsay’.
[2] See Part #166.
[3] As in, those who had set up the Venetian Commune during the Popular Wars.
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