Being Japan is suffering.
Do the Japanese at least get to leave the islands nowadays, or are they still stuck there as serfs? At this rate it's hard to imagine Russia-proper's cities being less friendly to Japanese than Yapon itself.
Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Do the Japanese at least get to leave the islands nowadays, or are they still stuck there as serfs? At this rate it's hard to imagine Russia-proper's cities being less friendly to Japanese than Yapon itself.
I imagine they'll be stuck as serfs until they rise up in the Sunrise War
I wonder if Timeline L people would see OTL Japan as suffering just as much, with only the specifics differing.
Strategic bombing of cities seems to be a taboo in Timeline L on par with OTL's use of nukes, so what WWII Japan experienced is like some insane dystopian vision of TTL's nightmares come to life. And while OTL Japan's indigenous culture didn't suffer from decades of Russian exploitation, it did become something of an American vassal post-WWII -- and that vassalage resulted in large part from said strategic bombing. A Timeline L native might look at Japanese baseball (an American sport, they'd sniff, traditionally limited to the American cultural sphere of influence) or anime/manga (foundationally heavily influenced by U.S. Donald Duck comics, in a way that'd evoke the Timeline L's "Japan is a nation of imitators" meme) and see it as evidence of American cultural contamination of the Yamato Spirit.
I'd been wondering when we'd get back to discussing TTL's history of rocketry! There'd been an interesting spoiler-ish excerpt some time ago, talking about some Franco-British-Italian spaceplane project. Now I understand why the latter was included; clearly Italy's spaceflight heritage is more renowned in TTL. And honestly, reaching space by 1923 is really impressive compared to OTL, where it took until 1942 before a vertical V2 test achieved a similar altitude record. It's clear that rocketry is further advanced in general, which will have some interesting implications going forward. Most importantly, the delay in electronics implied by the modern day segments means that crewed space activity will be far more important, especially in the field of observation and communication satellites. Similar to the "Telegraph Wars", you might see that kind of largely crewed space approach already entrenched by the time that uncrewed satellites might be able to compete. Taken together, it could lead to Earth orbit being far more populated than OTL, where the idea of mass space inhabitation has yet to get off the ground. In any case, I'm definitely looking forward to the further discussion of TTL's spaceflight history; so much could go differently!
Thande
Donor
As people requested more flags, before I post the next update, here are More Flags. I hope you appreciate them, as my computer blew up halfway through and I had to redo some of them that hadn't saved...
I'll respond to recent questions in the next post before posting the next update.
I'll respond to recent questions in the next post before posting the next update.
Thande
Donor
First of all, thanks for the comments and questions everyone.
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In the next post - the actual update at last!
That's inconsistency on my part, although I could see both terms being in use.
Corsica rose up again in revolt and re-established its republic after Leo Bone's Toulon adventure, though I don't think this was explicitly stated in the update in question. It then became a British ally (like OTL). The bit I did have to retcon was Malta, after I forgot it wouldn't already be British in TTL.
You notice Societist parallels when you start looking for them - I came across them in quotes from 18th century European authors as well, annoyingly long after I'd written the 18th century parts of the TL.
Yes, I entirely planned it that way and that is not at all a happy coincidence
I think you misunderstood the wording. The exact circumstances of what happened when he fled to the Mauré were never explicitly revealed in-universe because it presumably involved him disobeying orders and his men may even have thrown a few Jacobin loyalists over the side, so even after the Restoration it was convenient for them not to mention this. That doesn't mean they didn't find out what happened to La Pérouse and his men, he eventually came back to France while some of them stayed in Autiaraux.
What do you mean?
Indeed.
Not a comprehensive update yet, these things are better told as part of updates written later but looking backwards. As for the Wesleyans, they were persecuted in OTL as well and have thrived under persecution, especially in the ENA (and most notably in Pennsylvania).
Interesting ideas!
I set up a number of plot threads for the Popular Wars and didn't remember to use all of them. There were two Spanish officers who were meant to feature in the Popular Wars but instead ended up being delayed to the Great American War and the Second Spanish Revolution because I forgot about them. At least with a composer I can do it more retrospectively now you've reminded me.
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It still exists but largely on paper - next week's update will go into more detail on this.
In the next post - the actual update at last!
288.2
Thande
Donor
(Recording by Sgt Bob Mumby (BM) and Sgt Dominic Ellis (DE):
DE: Has he gone, Bob?
BM (pause): Looks like it, Dom.
DE: Thank (static) for that, I thought he’d never bog off and go back to his coffee. Well, now we can actually get back to something interesting.
BM: I thought he was scanning stuff about rockets? Rockets are interesting.
DE: Well...
BM: And isn’t this another of those dusty old exam paper guides you found? That doesn’t sound more int-
DE: Look, just let me have this one, alright?
BM: Fine. But next time, your round.
*
From: “Compiled Examination Papers (2004-2014), Imperial College of New Jersey; Volume 12A, American Political History: Student Commentary”, published 2015 by CNJ Press—
There’s a question every student of a certain age learned to dread, and it’s showing worrying signs of making a comeback: “What were the causes of the fall of the Fouracre Ministry?”
This one was full of pitfalls when your pa and ma’s generation were doing their exams, and it’s not gotten any better with time. Firstly, there’s so many possible things you could talk about. It’s a bit of a trick question to begin with, because a lot of students will think they have to list everything. That’s not a very good way to pass, because time and word limit constraints means that those students are going to end up not having enough capacity to describe any of the causes in sufficient detail. Broad but shallow, one might say, when the real meat of historical analysis should be narrow but deep. So a better approach is maybe to very briefly and concisely mention the wide range of possible causes, but then to pick one or two to focus on.
Of course, the great thing about learning history in a free country is that you know there’s no right or wrong answer here. That doesn’t mean you can get away with lazy mistakes, as we’ll come to in a moment, but it does mean you’re not trying to read the examiner’s mind and pick the ‘right’ one. An examiner will look to the arguments you use to justify your choice as a major factor in the fall of the Fouracre Ministry before deciding how to judge your work. If you happen to pick a cause that was in their mind, but don’t back it up with arguments, it won’t win the marks. Of course, this applies to all topics, but the sheer number of possible causes you can discuss here makes it a nicely clear-cut example.
Let’s start with a a common major pitfall. Again if your ma or pa sat an exam on this topic, they’d probably have been able to get a good grade for saying that President Fouracre was undermined by the infiltrating Societist cadres, and the Combine’s long-plotted schemes to strike. Not only is academia more cool-headed these days and less sympathetic to a Black Scare approach, but there is a more important factor. Thirty years ago, though it’d be a bit of a stereotypical argument, you could at least have argued that it might be a relevant factor. But now, with the exposure of certain documents, all but the most fervent conspiracy theorists agree that to blame Fouracre’s fall on the Societists is to confuse cause with effect. (And you’re not studying inversion theory here, thank your stars!)
Of course, it is true that the Societists were infiltrating cadres as cryptic reserves into all nations at this point, but that did not mean that they had any intention of activating a particular group of them. Rather, they were both following their ideological drive to spread Sanchez’s damnable message across the world, and also hedging their bets. According to their Doctrine of the Last Throw, they would not be able to guess where opportunities to intervene in the cause of the Eye would arise, so the solution was to prepare the ground everywhere ahead of time. Alfarus was a ruthless pragmatist who would use any means to advance his own power and that of the Combine; he would support one cadre’s revolutionary activities with an intervention, while triggering another to action as a mere distraction and leave its stalwarts out to dry when they were crushed by a nation. There was little in the way of favouritism here, with the notable exception that what seemed like the entire generation of Combine Societists viewed California with rose-tinted spectacles, and seemed firmly convinced it was always just about to join them of its own free will. Of course, the Californian government, trying desperately to keep its independence as the Empire pushed the Russians out of North America, probably helped play up that image in return for Combine aid.
The key point that we learned from those documents, though, was confirmation that the Societists’ damnable interventions in the last phase of the Black Twenties were mostly not long-planned. While Alfarus had always intended to use the Doctrine of the Last Throw when the conflict started to wind down, he deliberately did not select targets beyond a few modest ones – notably French Guiana, which had been a thorn in the side of the Combine since its foundation. Alfarus and his allies had resisted internal pressure to take the French toehold after the IEF withdrawal, fearing it would undermine the informal settlement with the French. Yet since then, besides being an irritating blank corner of the Combine’s otherwise total dominance of the South American continent, French Guiana had formed a natural spot for dissidents to flee to when Alfarus tried to purge them. Anti-Alfarus Societists had then often gone on to France, where some of them were now travelling to Danubia and influencing its own Vienna School in a direction Alfarus did not like. Eliminating French Guiana seemed like a good option for preventing the further propagation of such ‘deviationism’ by ensuring any dissidents had less chance of escaping the Combine’s ‘justice’. Further, it was becoming increasingly clear that France would indeed be too weakened by war and plague to protest if the Combine acted so as soon as the Franco-Russian conflict ended one way or another. Exhausted French public opinion would not allow it, once more supposedly exposing the ‘crisis of democracy’ Sanchez had written of during the Great American War.
French Guiana was not the only place Alfarus and his advisors considered a likely late-stage target at this point; one reason why the later feints were so successful is that they had originally been intended as serious attacks. Indeed, many even among the most senior Societists fighting in the feints were under the impression they were part of a full-force intervention until it was too late. But this is to get ahead of ourselves. The point is that the documents have revealed that there was no grand Societist scheme to destabilise the ENA at the time the Fouracre Ministry fell in September 1924. Or, at least, no grander than there was an opportunistic, low-level Societist scheme to destabilise every nation at that time, ‘throwing cadres at a globe and seeing which ones stuck’ as the wit Leslie Irving put it. Arguments that Societist cryptography had broken American codes also fall down on the basis that the Societists had achieved the same for many nations, and had not targeted the Empire in particular at the time.
So, unless you’re already the world’s best crafter of arguments, you’re not likely to get very far in an exam arguing that Fouracre fell thanks to the Societists. You might, maybe, get some marks for bringing it up and dismissing it – but try to use fewer words than we have! A better use of time and word count is to consider those causes that are possible, so let’s look at a few of these.
A significant cause, though one often neglected by students, is that Fouracre led a divided party and government. Though he was a capable leader and one whose intelligence bordered on brilliance, Fouracre was seen as cold, numbers-focused, and lacking the personal warmth or character that politicians use to build alliances. This was not so much of an issue at this point in terms of public image, as this was still a time when the public saw and heard their politicians rather seldom – subtitled newsreels at the film-odeon, the occasional scratchy broadcast heard in a public club or the house of the few wealthy enough to own their own Photel sets, perhaps the more politically engaged buying recorded speeches on groovedisc or tape. Indeed, Fouracre’s focus on numbers had impressed the public in his response to the Panic of 1917, convincing them he knew what he was talking about, and did the same in his announcements about controlling the plague outbreaks a few years later.
Yet cold competence cut little ice when he was trying to please multiple warring factions within the Liberal Party, never mind their fractious coalition partner, the Mentians. There were a number of seemingly paradoxical factors which influenced Fouracre’s fall from grace. In the 1918 general election, the Liberals had come close to a majority alone. Fouracre had considered governing as a minority, but had elected to approach the Mentians for support, worried his faction-ridden party’s tendency towards disunion would result in the seemingly strong minority government being easily defeated thanks to rebellious backbenchers. Getting the Mentians on side had, indeed, temporarily dissuaded the Liberal factions from throwing their weight around, as the government would likely keep enough votes to pass laws no matter what they did – but, as it became clear, they were only keeping their powder dry.
These factions included the old-guard ‘Thicket’ group, so nicknamed due to being led by the ageing Michael Briars. Briars was bitter about having repeatedly missed the chance to hold the highest office he had coveted,[10] and sceptical of Fouracre’s adoption of Hareby Economics as a solution to the Panic of 1917.[11] Though few saw Briars as a feasible President anymore (perhaps including himself), from his position sulking on the backbenches he continued to command considerable parliamentary influence as a potential kingmakre.
Another key Liberal faction were the ‘Overripes’ (originally ‘Overripe Aubergines’ before being cut down) in reference to the fact that normally purple aubergines can turn yellow if left to ripen for too long.[12] This reflected the fact that yellow or golden was the usual party colour of the Liberals, whereas the Mentians often used Populist tyrine purple (which had previously been used by Virginia’s Magnolia Democrats decades earlier). Calling this party faction Overripe was therefore an accusation that they were truly Mentians in heart who had ended up in the Liberals in error, or as a self-interested means of gaining power. The Overripes tended to be the defenders of Faulkner’s Social Americanism (against Fouracre’s colder New America Policy) and sometimes formed a bridge to the Mentian coalition partners (though the Mentians were also sometimes suspicious of them as potential competition). The Overripes’ de facto leader was the Michiganite Anthony Washborough, MCP for Littlefort and Postmaster-General.[13] Though sharing many views with the Mentians, he had a personal dislike of the party due to a past fighting their local chapter in Milwark in bitter partisan election battles that had sometimes descended into street fights. This did not help him make common cause with the Mentian leader, Magnus Bloom, who had been on the opposite sides of similar battles in his home city of Brooklyn.[14]
Fouracre, or rather his ally and chief whip Gerald ‘Jerry’ Alderney, managed to hold these fractious groups together for five years through economic crisis, war and plague – a remarkable achievement in itself. Therefore, one viable way of approaching an essay question like this is to argue that the wonder is not that the Fouracre Ministry fell, but that it lasted as long as it did. This does beg the question of what had changed, and this brings us into our next key factor.
Theorists such as Richard Brookes and (in a slightly different way) Paula Reid have argued that the historical American political landscape represents a tendency towards factionalism and anarchy, periodically and temporarily suppressed by a perceived need to respond to external threats. Their theories, especially Reid’s, connect the 1820s-1840s, with their long debates over slavery and Reform and their isolation of the Carolina Whigs, with the idea that such division is a natural consequence of America lacking such a coherent external threat. By contrast, the presence of Meridian-backed Carolina as a thorn in America’s side meant that the wheels of government turned rapidly in the late 19th century, and disagreements between Liberals and Supremacists (though often fiery and bitter) never manifested as grandstanding obstructionism. There was a sense that promoting paralysis in the halls of power, as had so often been seen in the earlier period with the Whigs opposing everything, would not endear a party to the voting public. Not with a very visible external threat breathing down America’s neck, ever seeking to get ahead – always a rival, even in the less hostile days of the Seventies Thaw.
If one accepts this framework, then it is possible to construct an argument based on how the circumstances of Fouracre’s government had changed. The disparate factions had remained united in the face of the threats of economic crisis, then the outbreak of war and then the plague, as none of them wanted to see the Supremacists return to power. The Supremacists were then led by Roderick Marley, a skilled speech-giver but one thought by many to be a mere cipher for his wife, the influential and strong-minded Lilian Marley (née Page). Lilian was a friend of the great Patriot Cytherean reformer LG Manders, her own aristocratic Virginian family from a traditionally Patriot background. In the same way that Magnus Bloom represented a Mentian reaction against former leader Ernest Newman (who had led the party into a now-unpopular coalition with Jack Tayloe), the Marleys showed a Supremacist Party turning against the macho imagery of Tayloe in favour of seeking out new electoral frontiers.
Yet the Supremacists remained steadfastly opposed to both Social Americanism and the New America Policy, the Marleys’ beautifully orchestrated rhetoric laying the blame for the Panic, the war and the plague all at the door of how these policies had left the American people ‘soft and mollycoddled’. Their answer to such crises involved heavy cuts to public spending and effectively leaving the poorest to fend for themselves ‘as God and Lord Washington intended, so they could pull themselves up through their own efforts’. Such a vision was sufficiently repellent to the Mentians and all Liberal factions that, for a time at least, the idea of the Supremacists taking power was too worrying to risk a factional ploy that might bring down the government.
But in 1924, two things had changed. Firstly, the year dawned with the Russians having been ejected from North America altogether, something which most – perhaps including Fouracre himself, judging by his diaries – had regarded as an impossible dream. Secondly, at first it seemed that the ENA was managing to contain the plague outbreaks, at least in the heartland. Ruthless and pragmatic action had seen the east-west railway links severed, with time-consuming and quarantine or disinfection-requiring changeovers needed before proceeding from west to east. Chichago and St Lewis had both seen significant outbreaks in early 1924, but these had been contained (sometimes via the brutal policy of forcing the poor from slums and then burning them down, but at least – much to some Supremacists’ criticism – the poor were financially compensated afterwards). It is easy to forget now, but in 1924 many newspapers in Europe presented the ENA and Combine as handling the plague equally well, with the quashed outbreaks in Chichago and St Lewis being compared to that in the former Lima. Of course, there had been a far worse epidemic in Drakesland, but so too there had been one in the Societist East Indies.
These two factors, both seemingly positive, paradoxically resulted in the withdrawal of the sense of urgency and peril that had helped keep the government together. The factions became more fractious, and Fouracre and Alderney (who himself was growing ill, though not of the plague) were unable to keep them in check. There was also a perceptible sense of ‘now what?’ With the Russians removed from North America, to the man in the street it seemed there was little to stop America bringing her soldiers home and exiting the war, having obtained everything she wanted. And indeed, this would be a happier world if such a choice had been made, despite its immediate disadvantages. But at the time, understandably, all Fouracre could think of was the Black Homecoming in Ireland. Any suggestions about allowing America’s ‘plague-ridden’ troops to return home were shouted down in Cabinet. Rumours of hushed-up desertions or mutinies, usually exaggerated (America’s troops in the west were loyal, if bored) swept the country. The Supremacists and the internal Liberal factions seized on these.
The American dilemma was also very visible to the French government, which was greatly afraid that America would, indeed, choose to exit the war. By August 1924, Europe was already five months into the so-called ‘Two Years of Hell’ of miserable, disease-ridden gridlock on the Polish-German front. The French regarded the balance as precarious, and that if Russia concluded a definitive peace with America (therefore allowing her to reclaim Prince Yengalychev’s POW army and strip defences from her east) it might be sufficient to tip the balance in Petrograd’s favour. France therefore began frantic diplomacy to try to keep America in the war, making all sorts of extravagant promises. The precise details of this are confused by the fact that the infamous ‘Changarnier Lectelgram’ was, as the name implies, sent not by Foreign Ministress Héloïse Mercier, but by her predecessor, Philippe Changarnier. Changarnier was still sulking over essentially being sacked by Prime Minister Cazeneuve a year earlier, demoted to a deputy role in the foreign ministry as Mme Mercier and her Diamantine supporters had been brought in as part of a national triumvirate. Only peripherally involved with the main stream of diplomatic exchange between the Tuilleries and Laurel House,[15] Changarnier attempted to play his own game, reaching out unilaterally with proposals Mercier and Cazeneuve had not signed up to. He also lacked the highest-level access to the one-time-pad encryption system the two foreign ministries were using, unbreakable even by Societist cryptography, and relied on a cipher that was breakable by those with far less resources than the Combine.[16]
The result was that the New York Register broke the news, on August 3rd 1924, that France was supposedly offering the ENA land concessions in return for continued American support in the war. Indeed, the ‘Changarnier Lectelgram’ the Register printed even suggested that France would transfer vast swathes of territory from Pérousie to Cygnia. Naturally, this outraged Pérousien public opinion (having won Autogovernance only a decade earlier,[17] now seemingly dismissed and overruled by Paris) and poisoned relations between the Metropole and Pérousie anew, setting the stage for a new confrontation in the 1930s. The tragic irony is, though Cazeneuve was not believed at the time, most historians now agree that Changarnier really had invented the idea out of his own head, and it had never been suggested in any of the actual correspondence between the Tuilleries and America.
American public opinion also generally took a dim view of the idea that Laurel House was supposedly ‘selling American warriors as mercenaries for a mess of pottage’ as Roderick Marley put it. While the French dealt with Changarnier by removing him from his position and exiling him as ambassador to Autiaraux, Fouracre was paralysed over whether to back or sack his Foreign Secretary, New Englander Gus Gilmore. Alderney’s illness had now left him bed-bound, and without his chief whip, Fouracre was lacking the needed political instincts. Fouracre eventually defended Gilmore, but after a period of hesitation that both made him look indecisive, and played to the public perception of him as a cold calculator who judged the numbers of backing his ally rather than seeing it as a matter of honour.
Many historians have argued that it’s misleading to attribute Fouracre’s fall primarily to the Changarnier Lectelgram, noting that there is little evidence that Marley’s rhetoric actually cut through with the public. However, others point to the idea that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or rather one of two. Before going on to the other, let’s remind ourselves of another couple of slow-burning political factors: the southern Questions and the Cooke controversy.
There is no need to go into the details of the Carolina Question here as it has been rehashed so many times elsewhere, but what to do with Carolina had been a divisive question since the victory of the Pandoric War. Instead, let’s remind ourselves of two additional questions, which – with Tayloe’s mixed solution of Panimaha to the question of western representation – were now more to the forefront. Historically, there had been little love lost between Old Virginia and Westernesse (the latter once having been treated as a distant colony of the former) but now the two Confederations were united in concern over a racially-motivated question. Nouvelle-Orléans had been quixotically added to Westernesse as an exclave after the Pandoric War in order to ensure American control of the mouth of the Mississippi, rather than working through an intermediary like the Kingdom of New Ireland. However, the demographic nature of Nouvelle-Orléans, combined with Westernesse having a tradition of liberal suffrage even before Faulkner’s reforms, meant that the region was now electing representatives to both the Confederal Assembly and Continental Parliament who were mostly black, Catholic, and francophone – a trinity more or less guaranteed to alarm Westernesse public opinion in one or more ways.
Old Virginia, which had been ‘given’ the former North Province and Hispaniola Province of Carolina after the Reform of the 1850s, had been putting up a similar plaintive complaint for decades, especially since the franchise had been liberalised. North Province had been split into Charlotte and Raleigh Provinces, and the latter colonised by black people fleeing oppression in Carolina and elsewhere, until it was eventually renamed Africa Nova in recognition of its black majority population. White Old Virginians had often interpreted these ‘gifts’ of black-dominated lands as being a punishment for Henry Frederick’s actions during the Great American War, something which many Supremacists at the time had almost openly confirmed in their rhetoric. Decades later, however, with the political landscape having changed and many white Old Virginians now voting Supremacist, movement finally seemed possible. Indeed, the argument by some (mostly One Carolina Movement Patriots) that Carolina should be restored with its pre-1849 borders received more support from Old Virginians just because it would result in these lands (and their black voters) being returned.
Of course, these matters might not seem particularly urgent in the midst of economic crisis, war and plague, but in fact these had only exacerbated the climate of racial suspicion, with Neo-Jacobin populists playing on the idea that poor whites were starving because money was going to blacks (and, among the politically powerful black middle classes of Nouvelle-Orléans, sometimes vice versa). Fouracre had always refused to be dragged into any of this; one of the better points of his cold and utilitarian view of life was that he treated men the same regardless of their skin colour, seeming barely to notice it. (Speculative romantic writer William Slade joked that in this respect, Fouracre could be compared to the worrying tendency of many Jacobin apologists at the time to posit counterfactual histories based on ‘what if Jean de Lisieux wasn’t a Racialist so I don’t have to pretend I don’t like him?’)
Another seemingly less than urgent question, but one which had nonetheless been boiling beneath the surface for years, was the question over Modified American Percentage Representation (MAPR), then often simply called ‘the Cooke system’ after its devisor, Adrian Cooke. There had been talk of introducing this for Imperial elections before the death of Lewis Faulkner in 1908, but it had lain dormant during the years of Supremacist rule under Tayloe.[18] While historically it had been mainly idealists and small parties who had pushed for the new voting system, things were starting to change. The system had been used for years for Confederal elections in New England, and in 1920 was also implemented in Cygnia – with the approval of former President Jack Tayloe, who had strenuously opposed it while in power. The Cygnia reform had revealed that, while it had been assumed for years that the Supremacists almost totally dominated the Confederation (doubtless helped by Tayloe rising to the presidency) in fact, all the rhetoric about ‘there are no Liberals in New Virginia’ turned out to be false. It was simply that the first-past-the-post bloc vote system used in the ENA had obscured the significant minority of Liberal voters, too widely spread across multiple constituencies to win any seats. This hinted to the Liberal and Supremacist party leaderships that MAPR might let them compete in areas they had lost ground in, such as Liberals in Westernesse since Faulkner’s death or Supremacists in New England (for Continental elections) or parts of Pennsylvania. The debate over electoral reform had been exacerbated by the fact that Parliament had already, and controversially, voted to extend its current term and delay the next election due to to the plague outbreak.
All these are causes that contributed to the instability and fractiousness of the Fouracre government. Then came the hammer blow of the Changarnier Lectelgram. Perhaps he could still have survived, but the final death stroke was the second wave of the plague. Americans had long been aware that, even if they prevented the plague from travelling westward from the Pacific (as had mostly been achieved) it could enter from Europe via the Atlantic. An extensive system of quarantine had been introduced to prevent this, with a high degree of success – a few small outbreaks in Mount-Royal, Boston and New York City had already been contained. But three factors now overpowered this shield: complacency, Carolina and Mexico. Corruption spread as insidiously as the plague itself, with unscrupulous businesses bribing quarantine customs guards to skip the wait – most successfully in Carolina and Mexico, but to some degree in the ENA proper as well. A few isolated outbreaks suddenly linked up and reached a critical threshold at the end of August 1924.
Embattled on all sides, Fouracre was dead in the water. A greater politician – and, some might say, a lesser man – might paradoxically have parlayed these challenges into a way to staying on, arguing only he could fix the situation. But Fouracre was fundamentally fatigued, having aged considerably from the strain of the office in time of crisis, and was unwilling to fight on. He tendered his resignation to Emperor Augustus, who called on the Liberal parliamentary caucus to elect a new leader who could command the confidence of Parliament. (Prior to the plague and the war, there had been talk of opening up the Liberal leadership selection process to a wider party electorate, as the Supremacists had pioneered, but the current situation quashed that reform for the present). Unsurprisingly, Anthony Washborough of the Overripe faction put himself forward, though few thought he could unite the party and work with the Mentians (despite their common goals) and he seemed too young to gain respect on the world stage. All eyes turned towards Briars and the Thicket, wondering if Briars would try to stand himself once again or endorse a chosen candidate.
Instead, to the surprise of almost everyone, Briars threw his support behind the Foreign Secretary, Augustus ‘Gus’ Gilmore. Gilmore had already seemed damaged by the Changarnier Lectelgram and Fouracre’s dithering over whether to support him. Briars’ act was seen as both a pragmatic way to defeat Washborough by uniting other factions against him, and also an implicit endorsement of the supposed foreign policy of continuing the war in return for French concessions elsewhere. To decidedly mixed feelings from Paris, it was this line which Gilmore took when the encrypted conversations resumed...and it would change not only America, but the world, forever.
[10] To recap Briars’ career, he first became de facto leader of the Liberal Party in 1894; became Foreign Secretary in the coalition war government under the Supremacist President Stuart Jamison 1896-1900; was passed over in favour of Lewis Faulkner to become President in 1900 despite having been seen as party leader; lost to the younger Michael C. Dawlish in the 1908 leadership election; was finally elected party leader again in 1909, but then failed to defeat President Tayloe’s Supremacists at the 1914 general election and was replaced with Fouracre as party leader. As someone who has had as many as four sniffs of the power of the Presidency, only to have it yanked away each time and now being past his prime, Briars’ bitterness is understandable. One matter not discussed here is that the public likely blame him in part for the loss of the motherland during the Pandoric War, as it was a foreign-policy failure, and this is a millstone he’s never shed. However, within the parliamentary party he remains influential.
[11] See Part #270 in Volume VII; the theories of Gordon Hareby are comparable to those of John Maynard Keynes in OTL, i.e. Fouracre spent his way out of the recession, much to the more conservative Briars’ alarm.
[12] Unlike OTL, America in TTL calls them aubergines (like the UK in OTL) rather than eggplants; this is nothing to do with the two countries sharing a royal link for longer, but is simply because the purple variety were introduced and grown there earlier. The name eggplant dates from when the most commonly grown variety were a small, round, white type that indeed look rather like hen’s eggs (the modern Welsh name planhigyn ŵy has a similar meaning).
[13] Littlefort is OTL Waukegan, IL. Note that the demonym for the Confederation of Michigan in TTL – which shares almost no territory with the OTL state of Michigan other than its Upper Peninsula, as it is a name given to the western shore of Lake Michigan – is ‘Michiganite’ rather than the OTL ‘Michigander’. Also note that Washborough’s cabinet position of Postmaster-General also incorporates control over the ENA’s state-owned Optel towers (now largely superseded), Lectel lines and Photel stations, and regulation of the privately-owned ones.
[14] Unlike OTL, New York City has not yet politically expanded to take in surrounding areas such as Brooklyn, though this is being advocated by some people as of the 1920s.
[15] A metonym for America’s Foreign Office, anachronistically applied here as Laurel House in Fredericksburg wasn’t built until the 1930s and they occupied a different building at this point.
[16] A one-time pad or OTP is just about the only readily available form of encryption that is entirely unbreakable by any degree of computing power or crib. First suggested in the 1880s in OTL but fully developed for the First World War, a classic one-time pad is a truly random sequence of numbers (or letters that can be converted to numbers). The sender and the receiver must both have a copy of the pad, and it must be ensured that no other copy can fall into enemy hands (meaning typically unique pairs of pads must be used for every agent or even every individual message). The sender takes their plaintext message as a sequence of letters (or numbers representing letters), adds each OTP number to each plaintext number in turn, then sends the gibberish message. The receiver must then subtract the same list of numbers from each in turn to recover the plaintext. Historically a major issue with one-time pads is the difficulty of generating truly random numbers with no patterns that can be detected, which took a great deal of effort, as well as the need to physically distribute them. The 1930s saw the development of electro-mechanical cipher machines (most famously the German Enigma) in the hope that they would effectively generate a new key with each use and allow encryption of bigger volumes of military traffic, but as is now well known, these were not truly random and could be broken by computer analysis. Earlier and more purely mechanical forms of similar cipher machines are being used by the ENA military (and others) and, as noted earlier in this section, these have secretly been broken by the Societists with new solution engines.
[17] See Part #275 in Volume VII.
[18] See Part #258 in Volume VII.
DE: Has he gone, Bob?
BM (pause): Looks like it, Dom.
DE: Thank (static) for that, I thought he’d never bog off and go back to his coffee. Well, now we can actually get back to something interesting.
BM: I thought he was scanning stuff about rockets? Rockets are interesting.
DE: Well...
BM: And isn’t this another of those dusty old exam paper guides you found? That doesn’t sound more int-
DE: Look, just let me have this one, alright?
BM: Fine. But next time, your round.
*
From: “Compiled Examination Papers (2004-2014), Imperial College of New Jersey; Volume 12A, American Political History: Student Commentary”, published 2015 by CNJ Press—
There’s a question every student of a certain age learned to dread, and it’s showing worrying signs of making a comeback: “What were the causes of the fall of the Fouracre Ministry?”
This one was full of pitfalls when your pa and ma’s generation were doing their exams, and it’s not gotten any better with time. Firstly, there’s so many possible things you could talk about. It’s a bit of a trick question to begin with, because a lot of students will think they have to list everything. That’s not a very good way to pass, because time and word limit constraints means that those students are going to end up not having enough capacity to describe any of the causes in sufficient detail. Broad but shallow, one might say, when the real meat of historical analysis should be narrow but deep. So a better approach is maybe to very briefly and concisely mention the wide range of possible causes, but then to pick one or two to focus on.
Of course, the great thing about learning history in a free country is that you know there’s no right or wrong answer here. That doesn’t mean you can get away with lazy mistakes, as we’ll come to in a moment, but it does mean you’re not trying to read the examiner’s mind and pick the ‘right’ one. An examiner will look to the arguments you use to justify your choice as a major factor in the fall of the Fouracre Ministry before deciding how to judge your work. If you happen to pick a cause that was in their mind, but don’t back it up with arguments, it won’t win the marks. Of course, this applies to all topics, but the sheer number of possible causes you can discuss here makes it a nicely clear-cut example.
Let’s start with a a common major pitfall. Again if your ma or pa sat an exam on this topic, they’d probably have been able to get a good grade for saying that President Fouracre was undermined by the infiltrating Societist cadres, and the Combine’s long-plotted schemes to strike. Not only is academia more cool-headed these days and less sympathetic to a Black Scare approach, but there is a more important factor. Thirty years ago, though it’d be a bit of a stereotypical argument, you could at least have argued that it might be a relevant factor. But now, with the exposure of certain documents, all but the most fervent conspiracy theorists agree that to blame Fouracre’s fall on the Societists is to confuse cause with effect. (And you’re not studying inversion theory here, thank your stars!)
Of course, it is true that the Societists were infiltrating cadres as cryptic reserves into all nations at this point, but that did not mean that they had any intention of activating a particular group of them. Rather, they were both following their ideological drive to spread Sanchez’s damnable message across the world, and also hedging their bets. According to their Doctrine of the Last Throw, they would not be able to guess where opportunities to intervene in the cause of the Eye would arise, so the solution was to prepare the ground everywhere ahead of time. Alfarus was a ruthless pragmatist who would use any means to advance his own power and that of the Combine; he would support one cadre’s revolutionary activities with an intervention, while triggering another to action as a mere distraction and leave its stalwarts out to dry when they were crushed by a nation. There was little in the way of favouritism here, with the notable exception that what seemed like the entire generation of Combine Societists viewed California with rose-tinted spectacles, and seemed firmly convinced it was always just about to join them of its own free will. Of course, the Californian government, trying desperately to keep its independence as the Empire pushed the Russians out of North America, probably helped play up that image in return for Combine aid.
The key point that we learned from those documents, though, was confirmation that the Societists’ damnable interventions in the last phase of the Black Twenties were mostly not long-planned. While Alfarus had always intended to use the Doctrine of the Last Throw when the conflict started to wind down, he deliberately did not select targets beyond a few modest ones – notably French Guiana, which had been a thorn in the side of the Combine since its foundation. Alfarus and his allies had resisted internal pressure to take the French toehold after the IEF withdrawal, fearing it would undermine the informal settlement with the French. Yet since then, besides being an irritating blank corner of the Combine’s otherwise total dominance of the South American continent, French Guiana had formed a natural spot for dissidents to flee to when Alfarus tried to purge them. Anti-Alfarus Societists had then often gone on to France, where some of them were now travelling to Danubia and influencing its own Vienna School in a direction Alfarus did not like. Eliminating French Guiana seemed like a good option for preventing the further propagation of such ‘deviationism’ by ensuring any dissidents had less chance of escaping the Combine’s ‘justice’. Further, it was becoming increasingly clear that France would indeed be too weakened by war and plague to protest if the Combine acted so as soon as the Franco-Russian conflict ended one way or another. Exhausted French public opinion would not allow it, once more supposedly exposing the ‘crisis of democracy’ Sanchez had written of during the Great American War.
French Guiana was not the only place Alfarus and his advisors considered a likely late-stage target at this point; one reason why the later feints were so successful is that they had originally been intended as serious attacks. Indeed, many even among the most senior Societists fighting in the feints were under the impression they were part of a full-force intervention until it was too late. But this is to get ahead of ourselves. The point is that the documents have revealed that there was no grand Societist scheme to destabilise the ENA at the time the Fouracre Ministry fell in September 1924. Or, at least, no grander than there was an opportunistic, low-level Societist scheme to destabilise every nation at that time, ‘throwing cadres at a globe and seeing which ones stuck’ as the wit Leslie Irving put it. Arguments that Societist cryptography had broken American codes also fall down on the basis that the Societists had achieved the same for many nations, and had not targeted the Empire in particular at the time.
So, unless you’re already the world’s best crafter of arguments, you’re not likely to get very far in an exam arguing that Fouracre fell thanks to the Societists. You might, maybe, get some marks for bringing it up and dismissing it – but try to use fewer words than we have! A better use of time and word count is to consider those causes that are possible, so let’s look at a few of these.
A significant cause, though one often neglected by students, is that Fouracre led a divided party and government. Though he was a capable leader and one whose intelligence bordered on brilliance, Fouracre was seen as cold, numbers-focused, and lacking the personal warmth or character that politicians use to build alliances. This was not so much of an issue at this point in terms of public image, as this was still a time when the public saw and heard their politicians rather seldom – subtitled newsreels at the film-odeon, the occasional scratchy broadcast heard in a public club or the house of the few wealthy enough to own their own Photel sets, perhaps the more politically engaged buying recorded speeches on groovedisc or tape. Indeed, Fouracre’s focus on numbers had impressed the public in his response to the Panic of 1917, convincing them he knew what he was talking about, and did the same in his announcements about controlling the plague outbreaks a few years later.
Yet cold competence cut little ice when he was trying to please multiple warring factions within the Liberal Party, never mind their fractious coalition partner, the Mentians. There were a number of seemingly paradoxical factors which influenced Fouracre’s fall from grace. In the 1918 general election, the Liberals had come close to a majority alone. Fouracre had considered governing as a minority, but had elected to approach the Mentians for support, worried his faction-ridden party’s tendency towards disunion would result in the seemingly strong minority government being easily defeated thanks to rebellious backbenchers. Getting the Mentians on side had, indeed, temporarily dissuaded the Liberal factions from throwing their weight around, as the government would likely keep enough votes to pass laws no matter what they did – but, as it became clear, they were only keeping their powder dry.
These factions included the old-guard ‘Thicket’ group, so nicknamed due to being led by the ageing Michael Briars. Briars was bitter about having repeatedly missed the chance to hold the highest office he had coveted,[10] and sceptical of Fouracre’s adoption of Hareby Economics as a solution to the Panic of 1917.[11] Though few saw Briars as a feasible President anymore (perhaps including himself), from his position sulking on the backbenches he continued to command considerable parliamentary influence as a potential kingmakre.
Another key Liberal faction were the ‘Overripes’ (originally ‘Overripe Aubergines’ before being cut down) in reference to the fact that normally purple aubergines can turn yellow if left to ripen for too long.[12] This reflected the fact that yellow or golden was the usual party colour of the Liberals, whereas the Mentians often used Populist tyrine purple (which had previously been used by Virginia’s Magnolia Democrats decades earlier). Calling this party faction Overripe was therefore an accusation that they were truly Mentians in heart who had ended up in the Liberals in error, or as a self-interested means of gaining power. The Overripes tended to be the defenders of Faulkner’s Social Americanism (against Fouracre’s colder New America Policy) and sometimes formed a bridge to the Mentian coalition partners (though the Mentians were also sometimes suspicious of them as potential competition). The Overripes’ de facto leader was the Michiganite Anthony Washborough, MCP for Littlefort and Postmaster-General.[13] Though sharing many views with the Mentians, he had a personal dislike of the party due to a past fighting their local chapter in Milwark in bitter partisan election battles that had sometimes descended into street fights. This did not help him make common cause with the Mentian leader, Magnus Bloom, who had been on the opposite sides of similar battles in his home city of Brooklyn.[14]
Fouracre, or rather his ally and chief whip Gerald ‘Jerry’ Alderney, managed to hold these fractious groups together for five years through economic crisis, war and plague – a remarkable achievement in itself. Therefore, one viable way of approaching an essay question like this is to argue that the wonder is not that the Fouracre Ministry fell, but that it lasted as long as it did. This does beg the question of what had changed, and this brings us into our next key factor.
Theorists such as Richard Brookes and (in a slightly different way) Paula Reid have argued that the historical American political landscape represents a tendency towards factionalism and anarchy, periodically and temporarily suppressed by a perceived need to respond to external threats. Their theories, especially Reid’s, connect the 1820s-1840s, with their long debates over slavery and Reform and their isolation of the Carolina Whigs, with the idea that such division is a natural consequence of America lacking such a coherent external threat. By contrast, the presence of Meridian-backed Carolina as a thorn in America’s side meant that the wheels of government turned rapidly in the late 19th century, and disagreements between Liberals and Supremacists (though often fiery and bitter) never manifested as grandstanding obstructionism. There was a sense that promoting paralysis in the halls of power, as had so often been seen in the earlier period with the Whigs opposing everything, would not endear a party to the voting public. Not with a very visible external threat breathing down America’s neck, ever seeking to get ahead – always a rival, even in the less hostile days of the Seventies Thaw.
If one accepts this framework, then it is possible to construct an argument based on how the circumstances of Fouracre’s government had changed. The disparate factions had remained united in the face of the threats of economic crisis, then the outbreak of war and then the plague, as none of them wanted to see the Supremacists return to power. The Supremacists were then led by Roderick Marley, a skilled speech-giver but one thought by many to be a mere cipher for his wife, the influential and strong-minded Lilian Marley (née Page). Lilian was a friend of the great Patriot Cytherean reformer LG Manders, her own aristocratic Virginian family from a traditionally Patriot background. In the same way that Magnus Bloom represented a Mentian reaction against former leader Ernest Newman (who had led the party into a now-unpopular coalition with Jack Tayloe), the Marleys showed a Supremacist Party turning against the macho imagery of Tayloe in favour of seeking out new electoral frontiers.
Yet the Supremacists remained steadfastly opposed to both Social Americanism and the New America Policy, the Marleys’ beautifully orchestrated rhetoric laying the blame for the Panic, the war and the plague all at the door of how these policies had left the American people ‘soft and mollycoddled’. Their answer to such crises involved heavy cuts to public spending and effectively leaving the poorest to fend for themselves ‘as God and Lord Washington intended, so they could pull themselves up through their own efforts’. Such a vision was sufficiently repellent to the Mentians and all Liberal factions that, for a time at least, the idea of the Supremacists taking power was too worrying to risk a factional ploy that might bring down the government.
But in 1924, two things had changed. Firstly, the year dawned with the Russians having been ejected from North America altogether, something which most – perhaps including Fouracre himself, judging by his diaries – had regarded as an impossible dream. Secondly, at first it seemed that the ENA was managing to contain the plague outbreaks, at least in the heartland. Ruthless and pragmatic action had seen the east-west railway links severed, with time-consuming and quarantine or disinfection-requiring changeovers needed before proceeding from west to east. Chichago and St Lewis had both seen significant outbreaks in early 1924, but these had been contained (sometimes via the brutal policy of forcing the poor from slums and then burning them down, but at least – much to some Supremacists’ criticism – the poor were financially compensated afterwards). It is easy to forget now, but in 1924 many newspapers in Europe presented the ENA and Combine as handling the plague equally well, with the quashed outbreaks in Chichago and St Lewis being compared to that in the former Lima. Of course, there had been a far worse epidemic in Drakesland, but so too there had been one in the Societist East Indies.
These two factors, both seemingly positive, paradoxically resulted in the withdrawal of the sense of urgency and peril that had helped keep the government together. The factions became more fractious, and Fouracre and Alderney (who himself was growing ill, though not of the plague) were unable to keep them in check. There was also a perceptible sense of ‘now what?’ With the Russians removed from North America, to the man in the street it seemed there was little to stop America bringing her soldiers home and exiting the war, having obtained everything she wanted. And indeed, this would be a happier world if such a choice had been made, despite its immediate disadvantages. But at the time, understandably, all Fouracre could think of was the Black Homecoming in Ireland. Any suggestions about allowing America’s ‘plague-ridden’ troops to return home were shouted down in Cabinet. Rumours of hushed-up desertions or mutinies, usually exaggerated (America’s troops in the west were loyal, if bored) swept the country. The Supremacists and the internal Liberal factions seized on these.
The American dilemma was also very visible to the French government, which was greatly afraid that America would, indeed, choose to exit the war. By August 1924, Europe was already five months into the so-called ‘Two Years of Hell’ of miserable, disease-ridden gridlock on the Polish-German front. The French regarded the balance as precarious, and that if Russia concluded a definitive peace with America (therefore allowing her to reclaim Prince Yengalychev’s POW army and strip defences from her east) it might be sufficient to tip the balance in Petrograd’s favour. France therefore began frantic diplomacy to try to keep America in the war, making all sorts of extravagant promises. The precise details of this are confused by the fact that the infamous ‘Changarnier Lectelgram’ was, as the name implies, sent not by Foreign Ministress Héloïse Mercier, but by her predecessor, Philippe Changarnier. Changarnier was still sulking over essentially being sacked by Prime Minister Cazeneuve a year earlier, demoted to a deputy role in the foreign ministry as Mme Mercier and her Diamantine supporters had been brought in as part of a national triumvirate. Only peripherally involved with the main stream of diplomatic exchange between the Tuilleries and Laurel House,[15] Changarnier attempted to play his own game, reaching out unilaterally with proposals Mercier and Cazeneuve had not signed up to. He also lacked the highest-level access to the one-time-pad encryption system the two foreign ministries were using, unbreakable even by Societist cryptography, and relied on a cipher that was breakable by those with far less resources than the Combine.[16]
The result was that the New York Register broke the news, on August 3rd 1924, that France was supposedly offering the ENA land concessions in return for continued American support in the war. Indeed, the ‘Changarnier Lectelgram’ the Register printed even suggested that France would transfer vast swathes of territory from Pérousie to Cygnia. Naturally, this outraged Pérousien public opinion (having won Autogovernance only a decade earlier,[17] now seemingly dismissed and overruled by Paris) and poisoned relations between the Metropole and Pérousie anew, setting the stage for a new confrontation in the 1930s. The tragic irony is, though Cazeneuve was not believed at the time, most historians now agree that Changarnier really had invented the idea out of his own head, and it had never been suggested in any of the actual correspondence between the Tuilleries and America.
American public opinion also generally took a dim view of the idea that Laurel House was supposedly ‘selling American warriors as mercenaries for a mess of pottage’ as Roderick Marley put it. While the French dealt with Changarnier by removing him from his position and exiling him as ambassador to Autiaraux, Fouracre was paralysed over whether to back or sack his Foreign Secretary, New Englander Gus Gilmore. Alderney’s illness had now left him bed-bound, and without his chief whip, Fouracre was lacking the needed political instincts. Fouracre eventually defended Gilmore, but after a period of hesitation that both made him look indecisive, and played to the public perception of him as a cold calculator who judged the numbers of backing his ally rather than seeing it as a matter of honour.
Many historians have argued that it’s misleading to attribute Fouracre’s fall primarily to the Changarnier Lectelgram, noting that there is little evidence that Marley’s rhetoric actually cut through with the public. However, others point to the idea that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or rather one of two. Before going on to the other, let’s remind ourselves of another couple of slow-burning political factors: the southern Questions and the Cooke controversy.
There is no need to go into the details of the Carolina Question here as it has been rehashed so many times elsewhere, but what to do with Carolina had been a divisive question since the victory of the Pandoric War. Instead, let’s remind ourselves of two additional questions, which – with Tayloe’s mixed solution of Panimaha to the question of western representation – were now more to the forefront. Historically, there had been little love lost between Old Virginia and Westernesse (the latter once having been treated as a distant colony of the former) but now the two Confederations were united in concern over a racially-motivated question. Nouvelle-Orléans had been quixotically added to Westernesse as an exclave after the Pandoric War in order to ensure American control of the mouth of the Mississippi, rather than working through an intermediary like the Kingdom of New Ireland. However, the demographic nature of Nouvelle-Orléans, combined with Westernesse having a tradition of liberal suffrage even before Faulkner’s reforms, meant that the region was now electing representatives to both the Confederal Assembly and Continental Parliament who were mostly black, Catholic, and francophone – a trinity more or less guaranteed to alarm Westernesse public opinion in one or more ways.
Old Virginia, which had been ‘given’ the former North Province and Hispaniola Province of Carolina after the Reform of the 1850s, had been putting up a similar plaintive complaint for decades, especially since the franchise had been liberalised. North Province had been split into Charlotte and Raleigh Provinces, and the latter colonised by black people fleeing oppression in Carolina and elsewhere, until it was eventually renamed Africa Nova in recognition of its black majority population. White Old Virginians had often interpreted these ‘gifts’ of black-dominated lands as being a punishment for Henry Frederick’s actions during the Great American War, something which many Supremacists at the time had almost openly confirmed in their rhetoric. Decades later, however, with the political landscape having changed and many white Old Virginians now voting Supremacist, movement finally seemed possible. Indeed, the argument by some (mostly One Carolina Movement Patriots) that Carolina should be restored with its pre-1849 borders received more support from Old Virginians just because it would result in these lands (and their black voters) being returned.
Of course, these matters might not seem particularly urgent in the midst of economic crisis, war and plague, but in fact these had only exacerbated the climate of racial suspicion, with Neo-Jacobin populists playing on the idea that poor whites were starving because money was going to blacks (and, among the politically powerful black middle classes of Nouvelle-Orléans, sometimes vice versa). Fouracre had always refused to be dragged into any of this; one of the better points of his cold and utilitarian view of life was that he treated men the same regardless of their skin colour, seeming barely to notice it. (Speculative romantic writer William Slade joked that in this respect, Fouracre could be compared to the worrying tendency of many Jacobin apologists at the time to posit counterfactual histories based on ‘what if Jean de Lisieux wasn’t a Racialist so I don’t have to pretend I don’t like him?’)
Another seemingly less than urgent question, but one which had nonetheless been boiling beneath the surface for years, was the question over Modified American Percentage Representation (MAPR), then often simply called ‘the Cooke system’ after its devisor, Adrian Cooke. There had been talk of introducing this for Imperial elections before the death of Lewis Faulkner in 1908, but it had lain dormant during the years of Supremacist rule under Tayloe.[18] While historically it had been mainly idealists and small parties who had pushed for the new voting system, things were starting to change. The system had been used for years for Confederal elections in New England, and in 1920 was also implemented in Cygnia – with the approval of former President Jack Tayloe, who had strenuously opposed it while in power. The Cygnia reform had revealed that, while it had been assumed for years that the Supremacists almost totally dominated the Confederation (doubtless helped by Tayloe rising to the presidency) in fact, all the rhetoric about ‘there are no Liberals in New Virginia’ turned out to be false. It was simply that the first-past-the-post bloc vote system used in the ENA had obscured the significant minority of Liberal voters, too widely spread across multiple constituencies to win any seats. This hinted to the Liberal and Supremacist party leaderships that MAPR might let them compete in areas they had lost ground in, such as Liberals in Westernesse since Faulkner’s death or Supremacists in New England (for Continental elections) or parts of Pennsylvania. The debate over electoral reform had been exacerbated by the fact that Parliament had already, and controversially, voted to extend its current term and delay the next election due to to the plague outbreak.
All these are causes that contributed to the instability and fractiousness of the Fouracre government. Then came the hammer blow of the Changarnier Lectelgram. Perhaps he could still have survived, but the final death stroke was the second wave of the plague. Americans had long been aware that, even if they prevented the plague from travelling westward from the Pacific (as had mostly been achieved) it could enter from Europe via the Atlantic. An extensive system of quarantine had been introduced to prevent this, with a high degree of success – a few small outbreaks in Mount-Royal, Boston and New York City had already been contained. But three factors now overpowered this shield: complacency, Carolina and Mexico. Corruption spread as insidiously as the plague itself, with unscrupulous businesses bribing quarantine customs guards to skip the wait – most successfully in Carolina and Mexico, but to some degree in the ENA proper as well. A few isolated outbreaks suddenly linked up and reached a critical threshold at the end of August 1924.
Embattled on all sides, Fouracre was dead in the water. A greater politician – and, some might say, a lesser man – might paradoxically have parlayed these challenges into a way to staying on, arguing only he could fix the situation. But Fouracre was fundamentally fatigued, having aged considerably from the strain of the office in time of crisis, and was unwilling to fight on. He tendered his resignation to Emperor Augustus, who called on the Liberal parliamentary caucus to elect a new leader who could command the confidence of Parliament. (Prior to the plague and the war, there had been talk of opening up the Liberal leadership selection process to a wider party electorate, as the Supremacists had pioneered, but the current situation quashed that reform for the present). Unsurprisingly, Anthony Washborough of the Overripe faction put himself forward, though few thought he could unite the party and work with the Mentians (despite their common goals) and he seemed too young to gain respect on the world stage. All eyes turned towards Briars and the Thicket, wondering if Briars would try to stand himself once again or endorse a chosen candidate.
Instead, to the surprise of almost everyone, Briars threw his support behind the Foreign Secretary, Augustus ‘Gus’ Gilmore. Gilmore had already seemed damaged by the Changarnier Lectelgram and Fouracre’s dithering over whether to support him. Briars’ act was seen as both a pragmatic way to defeat Washborough by uniting other factions against him, and also an implicit endorsement of the supposed foreign policy of continuing the war in return for French concessions elsewhere. To decidedly mixed feelings from Paris, it was this line which Gilmore took when the encrypted conversations resumed...and it would change not only America, but the world, forever.
[10] To recap Briars’ career, he first became de facto leader of the Liberal Party in 1894; became Foreign Secretary in the coalition war government under the Supremacist President Stuart Jamison 1896-1900; was passed over in favour of Lewis Faulkner to become President in 1900 despite having been seen as party leader; lost to the younger Michael C. Dawlish in the 1908 leadership election; was finally elected party leader again in 1909, but then failed to defeat President Tayloe’s Supremacists at the 1914 general election and was replaced with Fouracre as party leader. As someone who has had as many as four sniffs of the power of the Presidency, only to have it yanked away each time and now being past his prime, Briars’ bitterness is understandable. One matter not discussed here is that the public likely blame him in part for the loss of the motherland during the Pandoric War, as it was a foreign-policy failure, and this is a millstone he’s never shed. However, within the parliamentary party he remains influential.
[11] See Part #270 in Volume VII; the theories of Gordon Hareby are comparable to those of John Maynard Keynes in OTL, i.e. Fouracre spent his way out of the recession, much to the more conservative Briars’ alarm.
[12] Unlike OTL, America in TTL calls them aubergines (like the UK in OTL) rather than eggplants; this is nothing to do with the two countries sharing a royal link for longer, but is simply because the purple variety were introduced and grown there earlier. The name eggplant dates from when the most commonly grown variety were a small, round, white type that indeed look rather like hen’s eggs (the modern Welsh name planhigyn ŵy has a similar meaning).
[13] Littlefort is OTL Waukegan, IL. Note that the demonym for the Confederation of Michigan in TTL – which shares almost no territory with the OTL state of Michigan other than its Upper Peninsula, as it is a name given to the western shore of Lake Michigan – is ‘Michiganite’ rather than the OTL ‘Michigander’. Also note that Washborough’s cabinet position of Postmaster-General also incorporates control over the ENA’s state-owned Optel towers (now largely superseded), Lectel lines and Photel stations, and regulation of the privately-owned ones.
[14] Unlike OTL, New York City has not yet politically expanded to take in surrounding areas such as Brooklyn, though this is being advocated by some people as of the 1920s.
[15] A metonym for America’s Foreign Office, anachronistically applied here as Laurel House in Fredericksburg wasn’t built until the 1930s and they occupied a different building at this point.
[16] A one-time pad or OTP is just about the only readily available form of encryption that is entirely unbreakable by any degree of computing power or crib. First suggested in the 1880s in OTL but fully developed for the First World War, a classic one-time pad is a truly random sequence of numbers (or letters that can be converted to numbers). The sender and the receiver must both have a copy of the pad, and it must be ensured that no other copy can fall into enemy hands (meaning typically unique pairs of pads must be used for every agent or even every individual message). The sender takes their plaintext message as a sequence of letters (or numbers representing letters), adds each OTP number to each plaintext number in turn, then sends the gibberish message. The receiver must then subtract the same list of numbers from each in turn to recover the plaintext. Historically a major issue with one-time pads is the difficulty of generating truly random numbers with no patterns that can be detected, which took a great deal of effort, as well as the need to physically distribute them. The 1930s saw the development of electro-mechanical cipher machines (most famously the German Enigma) in the hope that they would effectively generate a new key with each use and allow encryption of bigger volumes of military traffic, but as is now well known, these were not truly random and could be broken by computer analysis. Earlier and more purely mechanical forms of similar cipher machines are being used by the ENA military (and others) and, as noted earlier in this section, these have secretly been broken by the Societists with new solution engines.
[17] See Part #275 in Volume VII.
[18] See Part #258 in Volume VII.
I'm guessing this is the LTTW version of all those Wehraboo/Notzi scenarios.
Damn, there is something so good about a government simply referring to itself as Humanity. Not the One State, or the World State, or the Imperium of Man, just... Humanity. Far beyond a simple state, but somehow the universality is still incomplete-- includes everything within, excludes everything without, simple as that. I wonder how the implication of the leader being the Most Important Human in the whole wide world affects the psyches of those in that office-- at a certain point it'd be weird if they didn't consider themselves gods made flesh during flights of fancy.
This paragraph is interesting. Is "Neo-Jacobin" an attempt by the in-universe author to read an intellectual current where there really is just simple homegrown racism, or does such a current actually exist? Do racists try to invoke Jacobin France's technological progress and nominal commitment to equality among members of the master-race to try and seem like they have some kind of coherent program/ambition? I get that so far the TL has treated Jacobinism as a relic since at least the end of the Popular Wars, and I think it's perfectly natural for ideologies to be sent off to the dustbin. But the continued existence of a few factors hints there's something worth pursuing here.
- the Portuguese junta. IIRC it was founded in the 1840s or 50s and it seems it will die soon-- but overall it's existed for 70 to 80 years, making it the longest lived Jacobin regime and the only one to last more than one generation. It's in the same league as Mexico's PRI era, the Soviet Union or modern China-- although these consider civilian parties to be the real heart of the state. I think it was stated before that the regime more or less gutted the traditionally significant navy and abandoned the colonial empire, in favor of a simple focus on an army of rustic youth with all the virtues of the old Reconquista participants and none of the religion. Maybe the ideological legacy here is a sort of machismo, or maybe austerity-- for example, a willingness to tolerate economic underdevelopment because all that modern luxuries do is corrupt the youth anyways. Much could be made of the fate of Portugal's old enemy, the Dutch-- urban and rich and ultimately victorious, but promptly fell to a scandalous ruin and were annexed by a barely-more-vigorous neighbor. If Portugal escaped a similar fate at the hands of Spain it's because of the Jacobins, etc etc. Really a sort of caricatured post-Nasser Egypt or Algeria seems like the best parallel, lot of suspicion of outsiders and their intentions and just as much trust on a military of moralists from humble backgrounds (with higher offices monopolized by new-money aristocrats but ssshhhh) who are naturally allowed to build business empires instead of actually fighting because of course they are.
- the French Noir party. Electorally insignificant, sure, but their direct link with the old Jacobins and Portugal's basketcase status means they're best placed to define what a Neo-Jacobinism even is. I think the most important point there is what they think of the Germanic peoples, because if attitudes on them are anywhere near as toxic as before it would be strange to call (Germanic) American racists "neo-Jacobin". I guess the attitudes of Lascelles have given way to something more "white nationalist" (minimize infighting among Europeans, refocus on those from outside the continent). It's hard to see what role such a philosophy could play in the Black Twenties, since the Combine hasn't gotten particularly creative with culture yet and the ethos there is recognizably European-- but maybe a conflict with it could be portrayed as the last bit of necessary white infighting. The Combine's opposition to the virtuous exercise of war is a plot to soften European men, and it's only gotten this far due to the UPSA's Latin and specifically French heritage. It's a confusion that more right-minded Latins and even Germanics have a duty to correct. The other important question here is whether the Noirs are considered doradist or cobrist-- they grew out of the latter but toward the former, and might overall be considered an anomaly. That could have implications during any future period of frustration with two-party systems.
- this apparently continuing tendency to "revise" Lisieux, and in the process expose some kind of virtue. I guess that virtue would have to be cold utilitarianism, or ""decisive leadership"". This more than the other two things seems like the best way for Jacobins or their descendants to stay within the overall ideological conversation-- making a myth out of Jacobin "efficiency" that verges on something like the weird "I'm not a Nazi, but they were years ahead in fashion, technology, etc." sentiment. I think this is the only way for someone of "neo-Jacobin" views to play themselves as essentially an eccentric (staunchly republican and populist, could allow them to feed off dissatisfaction with monarchs and their ministers in various countries after this war) doradist, or "beyond doradist and cobrist", and give Jacobinism a sort of last chance to be relevant before Diversitarianism starts to really take shape and oppose racism in its own way. Alternately, and maybe more realistically, Jacobin imagery becomes, and sticks around for decades, as a part of irreverent youth culture.
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I wouldn't be so quick to cite 1920s Portugal as an example of longstanding Jacobinism.
The state does seem to be influenced by its bloody heritage still, but it's probably not in the same discourse as the Jeanite Janissaries and the racists.
They've still got an upside down blood flag and are run by a class of people who owe their existence and power to the Latin Republic. They probably consider themselves a more moderate continuation of essentially Jacobin virtue. And nominal revolutions that switch out between different heads of the same army just adds more to the Egypt parallel. It's almost too coherent to even be a Syria parallel, they at least underwent a big change in composition and leadership of the army before and during the first Assad's come-up.
Probably less racism or murderousness overall but still some part of the conversation over what neo-Jacobinism is, if it means anything aside from racists who like the color red.
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The mention of solution engines in the footnotes makes me wonder about the state of computer science ITTL. While it's clear that the delay in electronics will see regular OTL computers be less advanced by the present day, mechanical computing itself seems to have a far longer and more important legacy than IOTL. What this probably means is that by the 1920s, the basic understanding and science associated with it is also farther advanced than its OTL point. It's likely that by the present day OTL will have long since caught up in this regard, but I wonder if this difference has had some kind of scientific or cultural effect nevertheless.
I admit, having once nerded out and given American confederations a representative color each based on their flag colors and/or a historical connection, seeing Panimaha continue the trend with a dark green I suppose can be associated with Great Plains/Canadian Prairie sagebrush or Canadian taiga alike pleases me greatly.
And yellow as a secondary for Panimaha fits well with its obvious reference to the fertile soil itself, much as I associated it for neighboring Westernesse as that one’s primary.Incidentally I find it a fun touch after all this time *America’s most reduced-to/most-direct heraldry symbol is still a star in TTL, albeit yellow on a red background than the Bonnie Blue-esque style of a white one on a deep blue of OTL.
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Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone - I appreciate the in-depth analysis above but I won't respond to it directly at this point.
What I'm trying to go for with the ENA flags is an attempt at a realistic collision between idealistic attempts at consistency and the messiness of real life. So each flag tries to have a unique colour, but in practice you get compromises like stripes and colours that don't really go with the canton, Drakesland has an overly-complex coat of arms style symbol while places like Ohio and Panimaha have a more simplified and stylised one, etc. Also Pennsylvania changed its canton to match the newer confederations but New York didn't and is the last one with a Union Jack, and so on. The war ensign was also inspired by how places like India and Jamaica in OTL still have a version of the British white ensign for their navies, even though the St George's cross now looks incongruous.I admit, having once nerded out and given American confederations a representative color each based on their flag colors and/or a historical connection, seeing Panimaha continue the trend with a dark green I suppose can be associated with Great Plains/Canadian Prairie sagebrush or Canadian taiga alike pleases me greatly.
That was partly deliberate because I still want it to feel like an echo of OTL's America, though I have a feeling that stars would be a likely symbol associated with a new country founded around that time anyway - they seem to have been in fashion. Exactly why would be a good question, as stars on flags can both symbolise actual stars in the sky (which would be meaningful for distant colonies as they might have different stars to Europe, e.g. I believe the use of the Southern Cross for South America long predates its use in Australia) or heraldic spurs.
Y'know, this leads me to wonder how they got the Combine name stuck on them in the first place. Seeing as the nations, from what we've heard, think of them as just "Oh, it's the new Meridian government" I wonder how something as weird and distinctive as "The Combine" gets stuck on them as a name. I guess we're about to find out.
EDIT: Also, of course the in-world conspiracy theory would be that it's ALL A SOCIETIST PLOT, and of course the reality of the matter would be "Well, there wasn't a societist plot so much as there were many contradictory and mutually-opposed societist plots and the Combine didn't know which ones would stick."
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I remember you talking about how the french raids will change and impact Indonesia, so I was wondering about those french raids and their legacy on Indonesia?
Also what happened to Admiral Heemskerk plan(mention in your first tale about the dutch) to get rid of the raiders?
Whatever happened to the Saudis? It was said in thread 2 that Aziz bin Faisal bin went to Jizan and " would eventually rebuild its fortune in quite a different direction", so what was that direction?
And what happened to Sultan Sayyid and the Kleinkrieger war in nizwa? and how did this event change Arabian politics and religion change as reference in this quote "The more hardline Ibadi Islam of Nizwa influenced Sayyid’s supporters, changing the political and religious balance of the Arabian Peninsula just as had the defeat of the Wahhabis by Abdul Hadi"?
What happened to Wahabism, was it discredited after its loss in the times of troubles?
Edit: What's the difference between progressivism and its definition of our timeline and progressivism and its definition in the LTTW timeline?
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289.1
Thande
Donor
Part #289: Spain and Suffering
“There is a sense of relief tonight in Corte, where – on the second retrial – the black and white juries have finally reached agreement and sentencing can proceed. We go over to our legal correspondent, Randall Peters.”
“Thank you, Miss Jaxon. Yes, if you’ve been following this trial at all as it’s dragged on over the months, you’ll know how contentious it’s been. Zhang Lixiao, also known as Lee Chang, a Chinese student at the University, was found dead in June of last year, having been attacked in a back alley with a knife. Since that time, both the black and white police forces have faced criticism from all sides as leads seemed to peter out and the Chinese Embassy got involved. Questions mounted over both the ethnicity of the killer and whether the killing was racially motivated or purely financial. As you said, there’s a sense of relief and a pregnant pause on the streets of Corte tonight, with none of the riots and unrest we saw following the two earlier trials. Even as we speak, the sentencing of the guilty party, fellow student Ferdie Foster, is taking place behind closed doors...”
*
From: “A Short History of Modern Europe” by Anders Liljekvist (1980, authorised English translation 1986)—
Before the third millennium ever dawned, Spain was already a country that had been ruled over by Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths and Moors.[1] A history turbulent enough to begin with, but the Spanish identity would fundamentally be forged in the struggle to eject those Moors (in the form of various Muslim dynasties collectively known simply as moros) and reclaim the land for Christianity. Or, more precisely, Catholicism; while other parts of Europe would go on to embrace Protestantism and reform, for Spain the unreformed Catholic faith would always be ineluctably associated with the struggle to defeat the Moors, the Reconquista or Reconquest. From that struggle would be born a nation of great cultural achievement and globe-bestriding influence, but also one which too frequently would embrace dark superstition and paranoia.
Though our image of Spain after the Reconquista will always be coloured by propaganda created by her jealous and fearful enemies, there is a kernel of truth to our picture of the Inquisition acting as the world’s first state secret police, policing the very thoughts of the people.[2] The remaining Muslims and Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Catholicism, but then these converts – referred to as moriscos and marranos respectively – were viewed with suspicion and often later persecuted or deported anyway. Spain had discovered a truth which would be rediscovered again and again by totalitarian regimes throughout history; if one abolishes freedom of thought, that means one can never trust anyone ever again, because one will never know if they truly believe what they say or are going along with it out of fear until they can stab one in the back. It is an attitude which makes one fearful of suffering any defeat, lest such secret traitors, browbeat into submission only by the perceived strength of the state, be emboldened by it and rise up once more. The result, too often throughout history, has been regimes that feel unable to command strategic retreats to win battles later, that are scared of their own people and begin to doubt that any of them feel true loyalty at all. The supposed strength of an iron fist ruling by fear ultimately leads to a horrible, hollow weakness within.
But in the immediate aftermath of the Reconquista, Spain was certainly strong. The last Muslim kingdom, Granada, fell in 1492 – the same year that Columbus discovered the Novamund. Spain, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon now united, had been wound up like a spring by her drive to reclaim her lands from the Moors. Now she saw new worlds to conquer, and all the fervent fury of the Reconquista would be unleashed upon the peoples of the Novamund, from the Aztecs to the Maya to the Tahuantinsuya. Europe, too, would see the growing power of Spain, the nation that dared partition the world with her neighbour Portugal with the Pope’s blessing. Portugal herself, and her half of the world, would become united with Spain in 1580. Charles V ruled an empire in Italy and the Low Countries and became Holy Roman Emperor, and for a time it seemed like something akin to the Roman Empire in truth would be forged by the Spanish Hapsburgs.
That was not to be, but Spain, her coffers swelled by plunder from the Novamund brought in convoys of treasure ships, was still the leading power of Europe – and perhaps even the world. There was a time when she even contemplated the conquest of Ming China from her base in the Philippines. The two continents of the Novamund were dominated by her, or so it seemed, as few rivals had settled the northern lands of North America yet.[3] The Spanish language, the language of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, spread across the world. It is a measure of the strength of that language and culture that, as the one whose regions over which the Societists would later hold the most sway, it has still survived their attempts to delete it from existence.
Though Spain’s golden age lasted a century, from the perspective of history it shrinks to an eyeblink – as the historian Ichabod Wendell has put it, a night’s celebratory bender followed by centuries of hangover. Things began to go wrong as Spain lost the Dutch Republic in the Eighty Years’ War, was defeated in her attempt to conquer England in 1588, and was severely weakened by the Thirty Years’ War and decades of misrule under increasingly inbred Hapsburg kings. Paradoxically, that very wealth of the Novamund served to ultimately harm her economy. The successes abroad of smaller Protestant powers would only throw more fuel on the fire of a paranoid culture fearful of the enemy within. The Dutch, and later the English, even challenged the Spanish in the Novamund. To add insult to injury, Portugal was lost in 1640. Spain remained a cultural powerhouse, the nation of Velázquez and El Greco, of Victoria and Morales, but began to lose grip on her political and military dominance. The once-undefeatable tercio formation became outclassed on land, the hefty galleons at sea vulnerable to smaller English and Dutch ships.
Spain could have reformed and modernised to keep up with her neighbours, but this would prove to be very contentious in the centuries to come. A moment’s thought will reveal the reasons for this: Spain had demonstrably won a huge empire and military glory, being ‘gifted’ two entire continents, after a policy of fanatical Catholicism and crusade against the Moors. Cause and effect were frequently invoked, that God had smiled on such a policy, and deviation from it (as the Enlightenment dawned) seemed unlikely, in the eyes of many, to improve the situation. The centuries of Reconquista had also produced a hereditary class of nobility, the hidalgos, who lived off past glories, idolised a chivalric age that had never existed, and were contemptuous of work and workers. Some historians have even controversially compared the hidalgos to the samuray or Yapon, a similarly parasitic and worthless group of hereditary military nobles who, in that case, weakened their land so much that it was left as easy prey for the Russians.[4] Despite being famously mocked by Cervantes with his unforgettable character of Don Quixote, the hidalgos would continue to ensure that Spain’s court was little more than a patronage machine to enrich themselves at the expense of the people.
In this debate it mattered little that the economic hit taken from the expulsion of the moriscos had helped spark a rebellion – the Revolt of the Comuneros – as early as 1520. This would be the first revolt in Spain of Catholic subjects against their rulers, violence of Christian against Christian with the struggle against the Moors no longer hanging over them as a drive to unity. But it would be far from the last. Historians debate whether the Comuneros represent an early case of a truly modern popular revolution or a more traditional mediaeval peasants’ revolt against tax policies, but they had set a precedent.
Circumstances in the seventeenth century were certainly not kind to Spain, with plague and famine abounding and muscular France under Louis XIV getting the better of the country in several wars. Yet beyond this, misrule played a big role in the country’s decline. The last Hapsburg king, Charles (or Carlos) II was so inbred that his line terminate – but decades after everyone had expected. Not for the last time, Spain was effectively frozen for years as Europe waited impatiently for its king to die so they could have a succession war. The War of the Spanish Succession is only the European front of the First War of Supremacy, a war which reached far beyond Spain and was ultimately the beginning of Spain’s hold on the Novamund declining. In the end a solution was reached which pleased nobody, with a French Bourbon on the Spanish throne but not leading to a unification with France as Louis XIV had hoped. Spain and her empire would go on to become little more than a bargaining chip in the future Wars of Supremacy. Meanwhile, her new Bourbon kings and their chief ministers attempted haplessly to introduce Enlightenment reforms, while facing opposition from both the nobility and the ‘priest-ridden’ (as they were often dismissed) people.[5] Spain continued to be seen as backwards by the rest of Europe; the last trial for being suspected ‘secret Jews’ or Muslims took place as late as 1727. Her complicated racial categories, expressed most comprehensively by the Casta system in the Novamund, doubtless played a role in inspiring the Jacobins and other totalitarians seeking to categorise men in neat pigeonholes.
The biggest blow to Spain, and the one which finally knocked the props out from under her connections to past glories, came with the Second Platinean War and the independence of the United Provinces of South America. For the first time in history, the link between speaking Spanish and being Spanish had been broken.[6] A powerful new Spanish-speaking nation, which at one point looked as though it might unite the whole of the Spanish Novamund under its (seemingly) radical new republican government, had replaced the legacy of the conquistadores. This, more than anything, served to trigger a period of national reflection and concern, but too soon this would be interrupted by the Jacobin Wars. Spain suffered a fatal moment of weakness in 1801 with the death of King Philip VI and his possibly-maddened disinheriting of his eldest son Charles on his deathbed in favour of his younger son Philip. Civil war between the Carlistas and Felipistas took place simultaneously with an invasion by the French Latin Republic, and the outcome was predictable.
Surprisingly in contrast with their conduct elsewhere (but reflecting Lisieux’s pragmatism) the French did not impose a Jacobin racial republic on Spain, but allowed Philip VII to keep his throne as a puppet – while Charles, the claimant Charles IV, fled into exile in Spain’s remaining colonies in the Novamund with his other brothers. There they would set up the exilic Empire of New Spain. The UPSA, led by President-General Castelli, sensed weakness and attempted to topple and absorb New Spain. But he blundered into war with the ENA and ended up only losing Peru to New Spain, giving the latter a new temporary lease of strength and credibility.
Back in Europe, it would be the struggle between French occupiers and enraged Spaniards that would prove the dark inspiration for the young Pablo Sanchez’s theories. The end of the Jacobin Wars saw Spain divided as she had not been since 1492, with an Aragon ruled by Charles of Naples and Sicily as (a different) Charles IV while Castile was ruled by the Portuguese puppet Afonso XII. Navarre was also carved out, initially as a Russian puppet state, while Galicia was lost directly to Portugal.
This period of foreign rule would only lead to further decline, with the Philippine War between Portuguese-backed Castile and New Spain ending in the latter’s victory. During the Popular Wars, as Portugal became weakened by the Brazilian War, New Spain struck in alliance with her former enemy, the UPSA. A Meridian false-flag distraction at the Third Battle of Cape Finisterre in 1830 allowed the New Spanish to land troops, topple Afonso XII and reclaim the throne following the First Spanish Revolution. Aragon was also reduced to only Catalonia under the rule of the Neapolitan kings, and some Navarrese territory was reclaimed. All of this left Pablo Sanchez disillusioned and he would ultimately make his fatal journey to the UPSA as a result, a state which also benefited from New Spain transferring the Philippines in return for the aid during the war.
The triumphant return of Charles IV was heralded by some as a final end to the decline, but it was not to be. Only seven years later, Charles would die and be replaced by his son as Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand, who had been born to an Aztec mother and grown up in the Novamund, was vigorous and effective but fatally contemptuous of Spain and Europe in general, lending his name to the term ferdinandismo, dismissal of the Old World in favour of the New. He relegated Spain to being merely another kingdom of the Empire of New Spain (dubbed ‘Old Spain’) and frequently left it to a regency while he returned to the Novamund.
Spain’s fairytale ending of the king returning in glory had turned to the sour aftertaste of reality, with the country once again ruled by a corrupt system of patronage and under the rule of ancient, nepotistic generals and vapid fops. In 1848 the Second Spanish Revolution broke out, its aims always vague and comprised of multiple, mutually incompatible rebel groups, yet united by a distaste for Emperor Ferdinand and his local lackeys. Though Ferdinand did respond to the Revolution, he was then distracted by the troubles in California ‘nearer to home’ (in his eyes) and launched the Campaña de Represión in a fruitless attempt to quell them.
Having declared a vague ‘Free Spanish State’, the Spanish revolutionaries lost their more radical members dissatisfied with this, who mostly went to help their Portuguese compatriots fighting the paranoid and centralising rule of King John VI. Portugal had been weakened by the Popular Wars and then the Pânico de ’46, with John’s repression having done nothing but winnow out moderates until he was facing the most fanatical of the rebels, enhanced further by this influx of Spanish radicals. One paradox of Spain and Portugal is that they were one of the few corners of Europe where Jacobinism, though opposed, had never been imposed on them by the French, which lent the ideology something of an exotic flavour for the young and impressionable. This would ultimately lead to the overthrow of King John, the flight into Brazilian exile of his son Pedro V, and the establishment of a Portuguese Latin Republic on radical Neo-Jacobin lines.[7] This would be overthrown in turn in 1867 by a less ideological but no less brutal military dictatorship, the Portuguese Republic, which would then rule the country until the Black Twenties. In exile as a mere Meridian puppet, Pedro V would pass away in 1889 and be replaced by his son João VII, who – like Ferdinand VII of New Spain – had never seen the Old World as he grew up. Unlike Ferdinand, however, he idolised it as a place of decadent civilisation and frequently travelled there before his accession to the throne (despite the Republic sometimes sending assassins after him). France in particular he admired, and even attempted to introduce some of her innovations in Brazil, to little success.
Meanwhile, speaking of Ferdinand VII, he not only lost control of ‘Old’ Spain, but also lost California to the new Adamantine Republic. He found his Empire bound up in the new Concordat alliance structure and tied to the unpopular cause of slavery (a cause he had fought against himself with regards to the Maya). The entry of the UPSA into the Great American War left the Empire high and dry, no longer truly part of an alliance with either the ENA nor the UPSA, yet subject to influence by both. Ferdinand died a bitter man in 1868 and was succeeded by his son Charles (Carlos) V. Charles lacked his father’s vigour and could only stand helplessly by as the ENA and UPSA reached a temporary rapproachment and ultimately shared influence over New Spain, its people frequently exploited by their unscrupulous corporations. New Spanish mercenaries were also often recruited to help tie down restive populations in places where regular American or Meridian soldiers were less willing to go, such as Carolina and Venezuela. When these mercenaries sometimes returned home, having earned more from American or Meridian private security firms than they could at home with the weak economy, Charles became fearful that they might seek to overthrow him, and cracked down.
To return to the Old World. The Free Spanish State, later the First Spanish Republic, remained incoherent, but the example of the Jacobin horrors of Portugal discredited her remaining extreme cobrists. The moderate figure Estebán de Vega rose to the top. In 1856 the Golpe Tranquilo or ‘Quiet Coup’ led to de Vega’s supporters arresting and imprisoning many of their opponents. Under French influence, a new constitution was then written which allowed Prince Charles Leo, Duke of Anjou and second son of King Charles X of France, to become elected President. This farce lasted five years before ‘President’ Charles became King Charles V of Spain.[8] This remarkably confused matters, as it meant that both Old and New Spain were being ruled by a Bourbon Charles V.
The French Charles V deliberately married a sterile lady as his queen as part of a long-term French foreign policy plan to have the kingdom become politically united with France on his death – the same goal that Louis XIV had dreamed of a century earlier. But if the Tuilleries had based their policy on past French kings, they would have done better to heed the warning of Henri IV – that Spain is ‘a country where small armies are defeated, and large armies starve’. As so many past conquerors had learned, from Vandals to Visigoths to Moors, Spain was a country whose mountainous geography and hot, dry climate made it a nightmare to rule. Not for nothing had contemptuous Frenchmen said that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’ or ‘the Pyrenees are the frontier of civilisation’.[9] But that same alleged ‘backwardness’ of the Spanish people was itself evidence of the inability of their governments to impose changes upon them against their will.
King Charles did attempt to pass reforms, but with little more success than the last time France had installed a Bourbon king on Spain’s throne; history repeated itself. Partly this was simple resentment of foreign rule (and the hapless Republic had shown that there seemed little alternative to embrace as a hope). The 1850s did see a new period of cultural flowering with the Valladolid School hyperrealistic artistic movement which blossomed further in the 1870s. Spain’s economic situation also improved as part of the French bloc, which led to a climate of apathy rather than fervent opposition. Attempts to introduce French-style constitutional government saw pushback from the hidalgo classes without obtaining the critical support from the people that might have been able to overrule it.
Just like her prototype in the Old World, New Spain was a land that continued to produce many great works of cultural achievement throughout years of decline, such as the Peruvian composer Alberto Peñaloza and the Guatemalan writer Julio Cardenal. Yet that decline in terms of military, political and economic power continued. New Spain had refused to recognise the regime ruling Old Spain until 1890, which by a curious coincidence was when the UPSA needed Hermandad nations to do so as part of a trade treaty. This, more than anything, illustrated just how much under the thumb of foreign powers the Empire was. President Castelli had wanted to conquer the Empire and add it to the UPSA, but why was that even necessary when the UPSA could influence it indirectly – and let their companies treat New Spanish labour worse than Meridian workers to make products more cheaply? After all, they could not vote for the Cortes Nacionales.
Chaos was unleashed in 1890 when Charles V was hit by an assassin’s bullet, possibly fired by a disgruntled former mercenary; though he initially survived, the wound weakened him fatally and he died a year later. He was succeeded by his son as Charles VI, who would then be faced with an impossible choice with the outbreak of the Pandoric War in 1896. New Spain had become less and less relevant, her four component kingdoms (Mexico, Guatemala, New Granada and Peru) all acting increasingly independently under their separate kings. Peru, and later New Granada, had grown closest to the UPSA and become deeply integrated into the Hermandad. Mexico and Guatemala, meanwhile, had tried to chart a third way by playing the ENA and UPSA off against one another, and it was here where Charles retained most power. He attempted to preserve neutrality as long as possible, but this turned into dithering, and he eventually felt he was forced to join the UPSA or split the Empire, as Peru and New Granada were pulled into the war by Meridian influence.
This proved disastrous, as Peru and New Granada would ultimately be lost to the Societists anyway, while the ENA took on Mexico, ultimately gaining Arizpe and creating the separate breakaway kingdom of New Ireland. In the First Interbellum, the remains of New Spain – now reduced to only Mexico and Guatemala – would be reduced to a mere American puppet. Fredericksburg’s influence would be obvious in cases such as the building of the Nicaragua Canal against the will of locals, and all the time, Societist propaganda was spreading...
Now rewind the cart to the 1880s and return to Europe. That other Charles V had become disquieted at his failures in Old Spain, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century he mostly focused on a more passive attempt to fight injustices, rather than seeking to sweep them away with grant reforms. Unfortunately, most of these injustices involved the exploitation of Spanish workers by French corporations, who – like their American and Meridian counterparts did to New Spain – could manufacture their goods with greater profit margins if their outsourced their work to a convenient neighbouring country with lower wages and less workers’ rights. This naturally also upset French trade unionists and led to the ‘backwards Spaniard’ becoming a new figure of popular hatred in France (the flames fanned by the extremist Noir party, despite its claims of Latin racial solidarity). Spaniards were caricatured in the French satirical press as being mere automatons (a figure easily recognisable from the popular Automaton Fiction Craze of a few decades earlier) who mechanically did their work, mechanically were ‘refuelled’ by corrupt priests, mechanically beat their wives and attacked animals. This negative portrayal of the Spanish was not only made by liberal anti-clericalists in France, but by those who considered themselves Catholic – showing how widespread the discontent had grown.
Poisoned relations between France and Spain faded somewhat during the Pandoric War; Spain, similar to the other French allies, was portrayed as the girl Hispanica clinging to her mother Gallica’s skirts as she charted a peaceful course through the storms of war. Spain’s economy boomed further off the ‘Vulture Economy’ created by the Marseilles Protocol, selling to both the Northern Powers and the Diametric Alliance.[10] Yet the war ended with a new period of decline; the Queen had died of the Peace Flu and the elderly Charles V had been weakened, yet he gloomily clung on for another twenty years. Spain entered what is known as the ‘Grey Period’, in which culture became backward-looking and ‘worthy’ in tone; while this is reflected in a number of nations during the First Interbellum, it seems particularly extreme in Spain, where more imaginative and modern productions of Spanish plays or symphonies often took place in France rather than Spain herself.
Throughout this period, the French Government waited impatiently for Charles V to die. Grand plans were drawn up by the Governments of Leclerc, Mercier (m) and Rouillard, things choreographed down to the last detail. On the death of Charles, his nephew King Charles XI of France would proclaim his claim to the throne, the Tuilleries would gauge the world reaction lest anyone start a war over this (again), and then Charles would tour the country of Spain winning the hearts and minds of the people. Indeed, there is some evidence that a prototype of this plan was used in 1908 when Charles (then still the Dauphin) and Héloïse Mercier toured Pérousie to win the hearts and minds of her fractious people, with some success. Yet Charles V still clung on, until he finally slipped off this mortal coil at the worst possible moment: August 1922, shortly after war with Russia had broken out. France was in no position to invoke her previous grand plans: the ‘August Crisis’, as it was known, paralysed her government.
The result was an obvious weak compromise. There could be none of the planned grand tour of Charles XI around Spain, explaining to its people that political union with France was the way forward, that they would now have the chance to vote for parlementaires in the Grand-Parlement (albeit only those suitably educated would have the right to vote for now, ahem). All the French could do would be to appoint a lieutenant to govern the country until the war was over – a war, it rapidly became clear, which would not be the only crisis to afflict the world during the Black Twenties. In other words, after decades of careful planning, the French found themselves right back in the situation where they and so many others had been before: imposing foreign rule on Spain as a half-hearted afterthought, in a way almost guaranteed to enrage its people.
Despite this, the French crown and government were not blind to this possibility. With some misgivings, at the suggestion of Cazeneuve King Charles appointed the Duc d’Orléans as Regent in Madrid. This was the seventh time in French history that the dukedom of Orléans had been created or recreated, and the third time it had been done so as a royal house. The previous dukedom had been rendered extinct during the ravages of the Revolution, and until the 1880s there had been resistance to re-establishing it – perhaps simply because the problematic city of Nouvelle-Orléans and its rebel Grand Duke had been a popular topic of conversation.[11] However, the dukedom was established once more in 1882 for another younger brother of King Louis XVIII (as well as Charles V of Spain), Prince Henri Philippe. It was his own son, Philippe Louis, who held the dukedom in 1922. The Duc was mercurial, energetic and strong-minded. He was praised for his sense of charity and humanity, using his wealth for the good of the people, but would usually prefer to manifest this by personally going and beating up slave raiders with his friends rather than paying for a soup kitchen. He was not afraid to go against anyone in disagreements, not even the King, and was rumoured to fight illegal underground duels (duelling had been illegal in France since 1626, and though the ban had often been flouted, the practice had become unusual by the twentieth century). In many ways, he was born a few years too late, being better suited for the nineteenth century era of adventurers like Liam Wesley.
Though the Duc did not seem an obvious choice for an administrator, Cazeneuve’s logic was that no-one could accuse him of being a mere colourless puppet ruler of the King. Privately dubious himself about the plan, the Duc agreed and went to Madrid in September 1922. With all his trademark vigour, he mounted on the trips around the country that had been planned, yet often deviating from them. He shocked and appalled some, and delighted others, in Spain with his businesslike, hands-on manner. He would frequently go into a factory and ask workers about how various machines worked, then give them the rest of the day off and threaten the owners with fines for their unscrupulous behaviour. He was also enthusiastic for Spanish history and literature, and would personally drive his own steam-mobile to search for particular views immortalised by their artists. Though the Duc was far from perfect – his mercurial personality meant that he could dismiss a complaint one moment or move heaven and earth to fix it the next – Cazeneuve’s plan seemed well grounded. The Spaniards could not accuse the French of having sent them a mere stand-in.
The Duc had no use for the hidalgo classes, openly slapping aside their proffered family trees and coats of arms and telling them to get a job. He put himself in the path of the assassin’s bullet more than once by doing so. In one memorable (but probably apocryphal) incident, the Duc supposedly visited a failed assassin in prison and told the hidalgo that he was commuting his sentence from death to exile to the Canary Islands. When asked why, he told the annoyed gentleman that “I understand you pulled the trigger yourself – it would seem a shame to end your life so soon after you did the first work you’ve ever done in it”.
While the Duc had won the hearts of many Spanish people, we should not pretend he was universally popular, or that it was only the hidalgos who disliked him. At the end of the was still a foreign ruler and an expression of an unequal alliance with France. The Duc was also a conservative Roman Catholic by French standards, which was popular with many Spanish peasants, but less so with the urban liberals he needed to win over as well. The Duc had always been notoriously suspicious of Jansenists, blaming the UPSA’s Jansenism as the first step on a slippery slope towards inspiring Jacobin republicanism, and this hurt his relations with the Spanish urban bourgeoisie which had grown under Charles V.
There was also the rather obvious factor that the Duc was only meant to be a temporary governor, meaning that it would scarcely benefit French interests for him to become more popular than King Charles XI, who had formally claimed the throne as Charles VI (confusing matters further with New Spain) and called for a full political union. The Duc himself was always clear and open that he intended to step down ‘once the crisis is over’ and he regarded his cousin as the rightful King, publicly approving of the Franco-Spanish union. Privately, he was more sceptical of the latter the more he interacted with Spain and the Spanish people, but he remained loyal. In 1924 America’s Imperial Intelligence Corps contacted their French counterpart, the Bureau Auxiliaire des Statistiques or just ‘Auxiliaire’ for short, with supposed information that the Duc was planning to seize the Spanish throne and then try to claim New Spain as well.[12] King Charles was always dismissive of such an idea, but it did spark some paranoia within the French government. It does appear there was no truth to it, and is likely an example of the IIC being distracted by false trails laid by Societist cadres in New Spain concerning other underground movements (real and fictional) in order to obscure their own activities.
In Spain herself, opposition to the Duc and French rule manifested in a number of ways. Just as when the First Republic had overthrown Ferdinand VII, the opposition was incoherent rather than united. There were those who wanted a new Republic, divided into Portuguese-inspired extremists and Adamantine moderates (despite the ‘failure’ of the UPSA), those who wanted a new homegrown constitutional monarchy (with whom as king?) and others. A few wanted the monarchs of New Spain to return again. Most peculiar of all were those who claimed that King Charles V had actually had a son, despite the Queen’s sterility, and who was living in hiding in the mountains under an assumed name. Exactly why this would be, and why the son of a French puppet king would be preferable to direct French rule, is unclear, and illustrates that discontented people were seizing on everything. Finally, quietly hiding beneath the tumult of all the others (which they deliberately promoted as more visible) there were, of course, the cadres of the Societists.
The Duc faced a number of challenges as the war intensified. The war was initially less than popular – after all, the main selling point for French-influenced rule had been Spain being able to pursue protected neutrality during the Pandoric War. However, the Duc mostly managed to sell the war as a defensive fight against Russia, and painted a picture of the famous ‘Tsar’s Armart Legions’ sweeping through Germany, then France and then Spain. He argued it was better for Spaniards to fight with their comrades far away than wait for the Russians to cross the Pyrenees, implying that it was the Spanish boys who would make the difference and tip the balance so the French, Germans and Italians could win. If far-fetched, the propaganda seems to have worked, and Spaniards indeed volunteered.
However, discontent rose when the ‘Armart Legions’ did not materialise, and Spanish soldiers often found themselves sent to do jobs that the Italians or Portuguese were unwilling to. In particular, after the defeat of Belgium there was a push to hand off the occupation to Spaniards. Though Cazeneuve was against this, fearing it would lead to disagreements if they did not stick to the occupation zones agreed, events would force his hands. Without technically having an assigned occupation zone, Spanish troops found themselves replacing Germans, then French, then Italians in their own zones as those soldiers were withdrawn for the front line in Poland. It was not exactly the glorious, desperate battle for defence that the Duc had claimed it would be. Furthermore, it was very easy for propagandists to mock. It felt almost like a parody of Spain’s glory days under King Philip II, four centuries earlier, in which her brave soldiers had fought the rebellious Dutch in the Low Countries. Now, they were reduced to mere watchmen holding down the Belgiums. Liberal satirists painted a picture of France patronising Spain with this duty, like indulgently listening to the old stories of a dementia-stricken relative in an asylum. They began calling for, at last, Spain to seek new glories rather than perpetually dwelling on old ones.
Then, of course, came the plague.[13] Once again, the Duc through himself into a challenge with his usual vigour, leading Spain through the crisis as she faced a deadly and unseen foe. The Spanish response under the Duc, partly because of his wise appointment of capable administrators, is considered by historians to be one of the better national responses to the plague.
However, neighbouring Portugal was another matter. The Republic, a reluctant part of France’s alliance, had grown more and more paranoid as the exiled Brazilian King João VII was allowed to reside in France after the Societist conquest of his homeland. The Republicans would not accept the idea that the genial, vapid exile cared only for his own self-indulgence (and there were plenty of French aristocrats willing to indulge him as a curiosity) and had no intention of ever attempting to reclaim the Portuguese throne. In their defence, his second son Sebastião (the first, Pedro, had died fighting the Societists) might well be a different matter. Portuguese royalists and other opponents of the government were alleged to be secretly intriguing with either João or Sebastião. But the Republic could not openly send assassins after them due to the French alliance. This split the paranoid, militaristic government, and ensured any response to the plague would be undermined. The government became notorious for allegedly using death-luft to fumigate villages from plague fleas – which was a common practice elsewhere – but not always telling the people to evacuate first, or planting undesirables there and claiming they blundered into the luft cloud. Meanwhile, the Republican and military elites – now second or third generation, and as corrupt and nepotistic as the aristocrats they had overthrown in 1851 – were flouting the regulations, unwilling to concede there was a natural phenomenon not subject to their whims.
The results of all this was that Portugal was overcome by the plague outbreak, and the Duc sealed the border with Spain, hurting the economy, in order to prevent it spreading further. Naturally, the sealed border was a useful propaganda tool for the Societist cadres. Despair among the Portuguese people also meant that they were turning to someone, anyone, who might save them.
All things considered, Spain seemed relatively stable. There was upset and discontent when Spanish soldiers were asked to do certain things, but the Duc always made a good and sincere show of arguing with his cousin the King of France (and the Dictateur, the Duc de Berry) about it, standing up for Spanish interests. It seemed that there might be hope for the country after all. But, just as in the days of King Philip II, the system was only as good as one man...
[1] ‘Spain’ here is used indiscriminately to refer to the whole Iberian Peninsula, as is common in histories of this period; Portugal is not distinguished until later.
[2] This book makes a number of claims about Spain being the first to do various unpleasant things which are actually somewhat debatable – see also the mention of social stratification.
[3] The Spanish worldview actually usually describes the Americas/the Novamund as a single continent, simply ‘America’, which this author appears to have missed.
[4] The author’s view is obviously coloured by the events of TTL, although he is more willing to give the Japanese the benefit of the doubt than many of his colleagues, alluding to past greatness and giving a societal cause for Japan’s weakness rather than dismissing it as always backwards (as many incorrectly do).
[5] This is somewhat simplified, as the Enlightenment tendencies of several of the Bourbon Spanish monarchs were not as strong as implied here.
[6] This is comparable to the same for English with the USA, of course.
[7] Note that this author switches awkwardly from John to Pedro (not João or Peter) here because around the time of the Brazilian exile, Portuguese kings’ names started no longer being anglicised.
[8] The regnal numbers are confusing, because Ferdinand VII’s son Charles is also counted as Charles V as he is also claiming the crown of Spain, and we earlier heard about the important 16th century figure known as Charles V, who was actually Charles I of Spain.
[9] This is one of those quotes where nobody agrees who first said it (Napoleon is a common claim) so it is probably older than people think.
[10] These are post facto historians’ terms for the alliances of the Pandoric War, which really were more just ad hoc collections of cobelligerents.
[11] As mentioned in Part #125 in Volume III, though that House of Orléans went extinct in the male line, a female scion, Henrietta Eugénie, survived and married Francis II of Austria. The reason given for not re-establishing the dukedom is probably a tad credulous, but reflects the increased importance placed on New World matters that tends to be a natural bias of historians in TTL.
[12] The deliberately innocuous name of France’s intelligence service is similar to its OTL counterpart, the ‘Second Bureau of the General Staff’ or just Deuxième.
[13] The order of events is a bit off here.
“There is a sense of relief tonight in Corte, where – on the second retrial – the black and white juries have finally reached agreement and sentencing can proceed. We go over to our legal correspondent, Randall Peters.”
“Thank you, Miss Jaxon. Yes, if you’ve been following this trial at all as it’s dragged on over the months, you’ll know how contentious it’s been. Zhang Lixiao, also known as Lee Chang, a Chinese student at the University, was found dead in June of last year, having been attacked in a back alley with a knife. Since that time, both the black and white police forces have faced criticism from all sides as leads seemed to peter out and the Chinese Embassy got involved. Questions mounted over both the ethnicity of the killer and whether the killing was racially motivated or purely financial. As you said, there’s a sense of relief and a pregnant pause on the streets of Corte tonight, with none of the riots and unrest we saw following the two earlier trials. Even as we speak, the sentencing of the guilty party, fellow student Ferdie Foster, is taking place behind closed doors...”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 20/04/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 20/04/2020
*
From: “A Short History of Modern Europe” by Anders Liljekvist (1980, authorised English translation 1986)—
Before the third millennium ever dawned, Spain was already a country that had been ruled over by Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths and Moors.[1] A history turbulent enough to begin with, but the Spanish identity would fundamentally be forged in the struggle to eject those Moors (in the form of various Muslim dynasties collectively known simply as moros) and reclaim the land for Christianity. Or, more precisely, Catholicism; while other parts of Europe would go on to embrace Protestantism and reform, for Spain the unreformed Catholic faith would always be ineluctably associated with the struggle to defeat the Moors, the Reconquista or Reconquest. From that struggle would be born a nation of great cultural achievement and globe-bestriding influence, but also one which too frequently would embrace dark superstition and paranoia.
Though our image of Spain after the Reconquista will always be coloured by propaganda created by her jealous and fearful enemies, there is a kernel of truth to our picture of the Inquisition acting as the world’s first state secret police, policing the very thoughts of the people.[2] The remaining Muslims and Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Catholicism, but then these converts – referred to as moriscos and marranos respectively – were viewed with suspicion and often later persecuted or deported anyway. Spain had discovered a truth which would be rediscovered again and again by totalitarian regimes throughout history; if one abolishes freedom of thought, that means one can never trust anyone ever again, because one will never know if they truly believe what they say or are going along with it out of fear until they can stab one in the back. It is an attitude which makes one fearful of suffering any defeat, lest such secret traitors, browbeat into submission only by the perceived strength of the state, be emboldened by it and rise up once more. The result, too often throughout history, has been regimes that feel unable to command strategic retreats to win battles later, that are scared of their own people and begin to doubt that any of them feel true loyalty at all. The supposed strength of an iron fist ruling by fear ultimately leads to a horrible, hollow weakness within.
But in the immediate aftermath of the Reconquista, Spain was certainly strong. The last Muslim kingdom, Granada, fell in 1492 – the same year that Columbus discovered the Novamund. Spain, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon now united, had been wound up like a spring by her drive to reclaim her lands from the Moors. Now she saw new worlds to conquer, and all the fervent fury of the Reconquista would be unleashed upon the peoples of the Novamund, from the Aztecs to the Maya to the Tahuantinsuya. Europe, too, would see the growing power of Spain, the nation that dared partition the world with her neighbour Portugal with the Pope’s blessing. Portugal herself, and her half of the world, would become united with Spain in 1580. Charles V ruled an empire in Italy and the Low Countries and became Holy Roman Emperor, and for a time it seemed like something akin to the Roman Empire in truth would be forged by the Spanish Hapsburgs.
That was not to be, but Spain, her coffers swelled by plunder from the Novamund brought in convoys of treasure ships, was still the leading power of Europe – and perhaps even the world. There was a time when she even contemplated the conquest of Ming China from her base in the Philippines. The two continents of the Novamund were dominated by her, or so it seemed, as few rivals had settled the northern lands of North America yet.[3] The Spanish language, the language of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, spread across the world. It is a measure of the strength of that language and culture that, as the one whose regions over which the Societists would later hold the most sway, it has still survived their attempts to delete it from existence.
Though Spain’s golden age lasted a century, from the perspective of history it shrinks to an eyeblink – as the historian Ichabod Wendell has put it, a night’s celebratory bender followed by centuries of hangover. Things began to go wrong as Spain lost the Dutch Republic in the Eighty Years’ War, was defeated in her attempt to conquer England in 1588, and was severely weakened by the Thirty Years’ War and decades of misrule under increasingly inbred Hapsburg kings. Paradoxically, that very wealth of the Novamund served to ultimately harm her economy. The successes abroad of smaller Protestant powers would only throw more fuel on the fire of a paranoid culture fearful of the enemy within. The Dutch, and later the English, even challenged the Spanish in the Novamund. To add insult to injury, Portugal was lost in 1640. Spain remained a cultural powerhouse, the nation of Velázquez and El Greco, of Victoria and Morales, but began to lose grip on her political and military dominance. The once-undefeatable tercio formation became outclassed on land, the hefty galleons at sea vulnerable to smaller English and Dutch ships.
Spain could have reformed and modernised to keep up with her neighbours, but this would prove to be very contentious in the centuries to come. A moment’s thought will reveal the reasons for this: Spain had demonstrably won a huge empire and military glory, being ‘gifted’ two entire continents, after a policy of fanatical Catholicism and crusade against the Moors. Cause and effect were frequently invoked, that God had smiled on such a policy, and deviation from it (as the Enlightenment dawned) seemed unlikely, in the eyes of many, to improve the situation. The centuries of Reconquista had also produced a hereditary class of nobility, the hidalgos, who lived off past glories, idolised a chivalric age that had never existed, and were contemptuous of work and workers. Some historians have even controversially compared the hidalgos to the samuray or Yapon, a similarly parasitic and worthless group of hereditary military nobles who, in that case, weakened their land so much that it was left as easy prey for the Russians.[4] Despite being famously mocked by Cervantes with his unforgettable character of Don Quixote, the hidalgos would continue to ensure that Spain’s court was little more than a patronage machine to enrich themselves at the expense of the people.
In this debate it mattered little that the economic hit taken from the expulsion of the moriscos had helped spark a rebellion – the Revolt of the Comuneros – as early as 1520. This would be the first revolt in Spain of Catholic subjects against their rulers, violence of Christian against Christian with the struggle against the Moors no longer hanging over them as a drive to unity. But it would be far from the last. Historians debate whether the Comuneros represent an early case of a truly modern popular revolution or a more traditional mediaeval peasants’ revolt against tax policies, but they had set a precedent.
Circumstances in the seventeenth century were certainly not kind to Spain, with plague and famine abounding and muscular France under Louis XIV getting the better of the country in several wars. Yet beyond this, misrule played a big role in the country’s decline. The last Hapsburg king, Charles (or Carlos) II was so inbred that his line terminate – but decades after everyone had expected. Not for the last time, Spain was effectively frozen for years as Europe waited impatiently for its king to die so they could have a succession war. The War of the Spanish Succession is only the European front of the First War of Supremacy, a war which reached far beyond Spain and was ultimately the beginning of Spain’s hold on the Novamund declining. In the end a solution was reached which pleased nobody, with a French Bourbon on the Spanish throne but not leading to a unification with France as Louis XIV had hoped. Spain and her empire would go on to become little more than a bargaining chip in the future Wars of Supremacy. Meanwhile, her new Bourbon kings and their chief ministers attempted haplessly to introduce Enlightenment reforms, while facing opposition from both the nobility and the ‘priest-ridden’ (as they were often dismissed) people.[5] Spain continued to be seen as backwards by the rest of Europe; the last trial for being suspected ‘secret Jews’ or Muslims took place as late as 1727. Her complicated racial categories, expressed most comprehensively by the Casta system in the Novamund, doubtless played a role in inspiring the Jacobins and other totalitarians seeking to categorise men in neat pigeonholes.
The biggest blow to Spain, and the one which finally knocked the props out from under her connections to past glories, came with the Second Platinean War and the independence of the United Provinces of South America. For the first time in history, the link between speaking Spanish and being Spanish had been broken.[6] A powerful new Spanish-speaking nation, which at one point looked as though it might unite the whole of the Spanish Novamund under its (seemingly) radical new republican government, had replaced the legacy of the conquistadores. This, more than anything, served to trigger a period of national reflection and concern, but too soon this would be interrupted by the Jacobin Wars. Spain suffered a fatal moment of weakness in 1801 with the death of King Philip VI and his possibly-maddened disinheriting of his eldest son Charles on his deathbed in favour of his younger son Philip. Civil war between the Carlistas and Felipistas took place simultaneously with an invasion by the French Latin Republic, and the outcome was predictable.
Surprisingly in contrast with their conduct elsewhere (but reflecting Lisieux’s pragmatism) the French did not impose a Jacobin racial republic on Spain, but allowed Philip VII to keep his throne as a puppet – while Charles, the claimant Charles IV, fled into exile in Spain’s remaining colonies in the Novamund with his other brothers. There they would set up the exilic Empire of New Spain. The UPSA, led by President-General Castelli, sensed weakness and attempted to topple and absorb New Spain. But he blundered into war with the ENA and ended up only losing Peru to New Spain, giving the latter a new temporary lease of strength and credibility.
Back in Europe, it would be the struggle between French occupiers and enraged Spaniards that would prove the dark inspiration for the young Pablo Sanchez’s theories. The end of the Jacobin Wars saw Spain divided as she had not been since 1492, with an Aragon ruled by Charles of Naples and Sicily as (a different) Charles IV while Castile was ruled by the Portuguese puppet Afonso XII. Navarre was also carved out, initially as a Russian puppet state, while Galicia was lost directly to Portugal.
This period of foreign rule would only lead to further decline, with the Philippine War between Portuguese-backed Castile and New Spain ending in the latter’s victory. During the Popular Wars, as Portugal became weakened by the Brazilian War, New Spain struck in alliance with her former enemy, the UPSA. A Meridian false-flag distraction at the Third Battle of Cape Finisterre in 1830 allowed the New Spanish to land troops, topple Afonso XII and reclaim the throne following the First Spanish Revolution. Aragon was also reduced to only Catalonia under the rule of the Neapolitan kings, and some Navarrese territory was reclaimed. All of this left Pablo Sanchez disillusioned and he would ultimately make his fatal journey to the UPSA as a result, a state which also benefited from New Spain transferring the Philippines in return for the aid during the war.
The triumphant return of Charles IV was heralded by some as a final end to the decline, but it was not to be. Only seven years later, Charles would die and be replaced by his son as Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand, who had been born to an Aztec mother and grown up in the Novamund, was vigorous and effective but fatally contemptuous of Spain and Europe in general, lending his name to the term ferdinandismo, dismissal of the Old World in favour of the New. He relegated Spain to being merely another kingdom of the Empire of New Spain (dubbed ‘Old Spain’) and frequently left it to a regency while he returned to the Novamund.
Spain’s fairytale ending of the king returning in glory had turned to the sour aftertaste of reality, with the country once again ruled by a corrupt system of patronage and under the rule of ancient, nepotistic generals and vapid fops. In 1848 the Second Spanish Revolution broke out, its aims always vague and comprised of multiple, mutually incompatible rebel groups, yet united by a distaste for Emperor Ferdinand and his local lackeys. Though Ferdinand did respond to the Revolution, he was then distracted by the troubles in California ‘nearer to home’ (in his eyes) and launched the Campaña de Represión in a fruitless attempt to quell them.
Having declared a vague ‘Free Spanish State’, the Spanish revolutionaries lost their more radical members dissatisfied with this, who mostly went to help their Portuguese compatriots fighting the paranoid and centralising rule of King John VI. Portugal had been weakened by the Popular Wars and then the Pânico de ’46, with John’s repression having done nothing but winnow out moderates until he was facing the most fanatical of the rebels, enhanced further by this influx of Spanish radicals. One paradox of Spain and Portugal is that they were one of the few corners of Europe where Jacobinism, though opposed, had never been imposed on them by the French, which lent the ideology something of an exotic flavour for the young and impressionable. This would ultimately lead to the overthrow of King John, the flight into Brazilian exile of his son Pedro V, and the establishment of a Portuguese Latin Republic on radical Neo-Jacobin lines.[7] This would be overthrown in turn in 1867 by a less ideological but no less brutal military dictatorship, the Portuguese Republic, which would then rule the country until the Black Twenties. In exile as a mere Meridian puppet, Pedro V would pass away in 1889 and be replaced by his son João VII, who – like Ferdinand VII of New Spain – had never seen the Old World as he grew up. Unlike Ferdinand, however, he idolised it as a place of decadent civilisation and frequently travelled there before his accession to the throne (despite the Republic sometimes sending assassins after him). France in particular he admired, and even attempted to introduce some of her innovations in Brazil, to little success.
Meanwhile, speaking of Ferdinand VII, he not only lost control of ‘Old’ Spain, but also lost California to the new Adamantine Republic. He found his Empire bound up in the new Concordat alliance structure and tied to the unpopular cause of slavery (a cause he had fought against himself with regards to the Maya). The entry of the UPSA into the Great American War left the Empire high and dry, no longer truly part of an alliance with either the ENA nor the UPSA, yet subject to influence by both. Ferdinand died a bitter man in 1868 and was succeeded by his son Charles (Carlos) V. Charles lacked his father’s vigour and could only stand helplessly by as the ENA and UPSA reached a temporary rapproachment and ultimately shared influence over New Spain, its people frequently exploited by their unscrupulous corporations. New Spanish mercenaries were also often recruited to help tie down restive populations in places where regular American or Meridian soldiers were less willing to go, such as Carolina and Venezuela. When these mercenaries sometimes returned home, having earned more from American or Meridian private security firms than they could at home with the weak economy, Charles became fearful that they might seek to overthrow him, and cracked down.
To return to the Old World. The Free Spanish State, later the First Spanish Republic, remained incoherent, but the example of the Jacobin horrors of Portugal discredited her remaining extreme cobrists. The moderate figure Estebán de Vega rose to the top. In 1856 the Golpe Tranquilo or ‘Quiet Coup’ led to de Vega’s supporters arresting and imprisoning many of their opponents. Under French influence, a new constitution was then written which allowed Prince Charles Leo, Duke of Anjou and second son of King Charles X of France, to become elected President. This farce lasted five years before ‘President’ Charles became King Charles V of Spain.[8] This remarkably confused matters, as it meant that both Old and New Spain were being ruled by a Bourbon Charles V.
The French Charles V deliberately married a sterile lady as his queen as part of a long-term French foreign policy plan to have the kingdom become politically united with France on his death – the same goal that Louis XIV had dreamed of a century earlier. But if the Tuilleries had based their policy on past French kings, they would have done better to heed the warning of Henri IV – that Spain is ‘a country where small armies are defeated, and large armies starve’. As so many past conquerors had learned, from Vandals to Visigoths to Moors, Spain was a country whose mountainous geography and hot, dry climate made it a nightmare to rule. Not for nothing had contemptuous Frenchmen said that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’ or ‘the Pyrenees are the frontier of civilisation’.[9] But that same alleged ‘backwardness’ of the Spanish people was itself evidence of the inability of their governments to impose changes upon them against their will.
King Charles did attempt to pass reforms, but with little more success than the last time France had installed a Bourbon king on Spain’s throne; history repeated itself. Partly this was simple resentment of foreign rule (and the hapless Republic had shown that there seemed little alternative to embrace as a hope). The 1850s did see a new period of cultural flowering with the Valladolid School hyperrealistic artistic movement which blossomed further in the 1870s. Spain’s economic situation also improved as part of the French bloc, which led to a climate of apathy rather than fervent opposition. Attempts to introduce French-style constitutional government saw pushback from the hidalgo classes without obtaining the critical support from the people that might have been able to overrule it.
Just like her prototype in the Old World, New Spain was a land that continued to produce many great works of cultural achievement throughout years of decline, such as the Peruvian composer Alberto Peñaloza and the Guatemalan writer Julio Cardenal. Yet that decline in terms of military, political and economic power continued. New Spain had refused to recognise the regime ruling Old Spain until 1890, which by a curious coincidence was when the UPSA needed Hermandad nations to do so as part of a trade treaty. This, more than anything, illustrated just how much under the thumb of foreign powers the Empire was. President Castelli had wanted to conquer the Empire and add it to the UPSA, but why was that even necessary when the UPSA could influence it indirectly – and let their companies treat New Spanish labour worse than Meridian workers to make products more cheaply? After all, they could not vote for the Cortes Nacionales.
Chaos was unleashed in 1890 when Charles V was hit by an assassin’s bullet, possibly fired by a disgruntled former mercenary; though he initially survived, the wound weakened him fatally and he died a year later. He was succeeded by his son as Charles VI, who would then be faced with an impossible choice with the outbreak of the Pandoric War in 1896. New Spain had become less and less relevant, her four component kingdoms (Mexico, Guatemala, New Granada and Peru) all acting increasingly independently under their separate kings. Peru, and later New Granada, had grown closest to the UPSA and become deeply integrated into the Hermandad. Mexico and Guatemala, meanwhile, had tried to chart a third way by playing the ENA and UPSA off against one another, and it was here where Charles retained most power. He attempted to preserve neutrality as long as possible, but this turned into dithering, and he eventually felt he was forced to join the UPSA or split the Empire, as Peru and New Granada were pulled into the war by Meridian influence.
This proved disastrous, as Peru and New Granada would ultimately be lost to the Societists anyway, while the ENA took on Mexico, ultimately gaining Arizpe and creating the separate breakaway kingdom of New Ireland. In the First Interbellum, the remains of New Spain – now reduced to only Mexico and Guatemala – would be reduced to a mere American puppet. Fredericksburg’s influence would be obvious in cases such as the building of the Nicaragua Canal against the will of locals, and all the time, Societist propaganda was spreading...
Now rewind the cart to the 1880s and return to Europe. That other Charles V had become disquieted at his failures in Old Spain, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century he mostly focused on a more passive attempt to fight injustices, rather than seeking to sweep them away with grant reforms. Unfortunately, most of these injustices involved the exploitation of Spanish workers by French corporations, who – like their American and Meridian counterparts did to New Spain – could manufacture their goods with greater profit margins if their outsourced their work to a convenient neighbouring country with lower wages and less workers’ rights. This naturally also upset French trade unionists and led to the ‘backwards Spaniard’ becoming a new figure of popular hatred in France (the flames fanned by the extremist Noir party, despite its claims of Latin racial solidarity). Spaniards were caricatured in the French satirical press as being mere automatons (a figure easily recognisable from the popular Automaton Fiction Craze of a few decades earlier) who mechanically did their work, mechanically were ‘refuelled’ by corrupt priests, mechanically beat their wives and attacked animals. This negative portrayal of the Spanish was not only made by liberal anti-clericalists in France, but by those who considered themselves Catholic – showing how widespread the discontent had grown.
Poisoned relations between France and Spain faded somewhat during the Pandoric War; Spain, similar to the other French allies, was portrayed as the girl Hispanica clinging to her mother Gallica’s skirts as she charted a peaceful course through the storms of war. Spain’s economy boomed further off the ‘Vulture Economy’ created by the Marseilles Protocol, selling to both the Northern Powers and the Diametric Alliance.[10] Yet the war ended with a new period of decline; the Queen had died of the Peace Flu and the elderly Charles V had been weakened, yet he gloomily clung on for another twenty years. Spain entered what is known as the ‘Grey Period’, in which culture became backward-looking and ‘worthy’ in tone; while this is reflected in a number of nations during the First Interbellum, it seems particularly extreme in Spain, where more imaginative and modern productions of Spanish plays or symphonies often took place in France rather than Spain herself.
Throughout this period, the French Government waited impatiently for Charles V to die. Grand plans were drawn up by the Governments of Leclerc, Mercier (m) and Rouillard, things choreographed down to the last detail. On the death of Charles, his nephew King Charles XI of France would proclaim his claim to the throne, the Tuilleries would gauge the world reaction lest anyone start a war over this (again), and then Charles would tour the country of Spain winning the hearts and minds of the people. Indeed, there is some evidence that a prototype of this plan was used in 1908 when Charles (then still the Dauphin) and Héloïse Mercier toured Pérousie to win the hearts and minds of her fractious people, with some success. Yet Charles V still clung on, until he finally slipped off this mortal coil at the worst possible moment: August 1922, shortly after war with Russia had broken out. France was in no position to invoke her previous grand plans: the ‘August Crisis’, as it was known, paralysed her government.
The result was an obvious weak compromise. There could be none of the planned grand tour of Charles XI around Spain, explaining to its people that political union with France was the way forward, that they would now have the chance to vote for parlementaires in the Grand-Parlement (albeit only those suitably educated would have the right to vote for now, ahem). All the French could do would be to appoint a lieutenant to govern the country until the war was over – a war, it rapidly became clear, which would not be the only crisis to afflict the world during the Black Twenties. In other words, after decades of careful planning, the French found themselves right back in the situation where they and so many others had been before: imposing foreign rule on Spain as a half-hearted afterthought, in a way almost guaranteed to enrage its people.
Despite this, the French crown and government were not blind to this possibility. With some misgivings, at the suggestion of Cazeneuve King Charles appointed the Duc d’Orléans as Regent in Madrid. This was the seventh time in French history that the dukedom of Orléans had been created or recreated, and the third time it had been done so as a royal house. The previous dukedom had been rendered extinct during the ravages of the Revolution, and until the 1880s there had been resistance to re-establishing it – perhaps simply because the problematic city of Nouvelle-Orléans and its rebel Grand Duke had been a popular topic of conversation.[11] However, the dukedom was established once more in 1882 for another younger brother of King Louis XVIII (as well as Charles V of Spain), Prince Henri Philippe. It was his own son, Philippe Louis, who held the dukedom in 1922. The Duc was mercurial, energetic and strong-minded. He was praised for his sense of charity and humanity, using his wealth for the good of the people, but would usually prefer to manifest this by personally going and beating up slave raiders with his friends rather than paying for a soup kitchen. He was not afraid to go against anyone in disagreements, not even the King, and was rumoured to fight illegal underground duels (duelling had been illegal in France since 1626, and though the ban had often been flouted, the practice had become unusual by the twentieth century). In many ways, he was born a few years too late, being better suited for the nineteenth century era of adventurers like Liam Wesley.
Though the Duc did not seem an obvious choice for an administrator, Cazeneuve’s logic was that no-one could accuse him of being a mere colourless puppet ruler of the King. Privately dubious himself about the plan, the Duc agreed and went to Madrid in September 1922. With all his trademark vigour, he mounted on the trips around the country that had been planned, yet often deviating from them. He shocked and appalled some, and delighted others, in Spain with his businesslike, hands-on manner. He would frequently go into a factory and ask workers about how various machines worked, then give them the rest of the day off and threaten the owners with fines for their unscrupulous behaviour. He was also enthusiastic for Spanish history and literature, and would personally drive his own steam-mobile to search for particular views immortalised by their artists. Though the Duc was far from perfect – his mercurial personality meant that he could dismiss a complaint one moment or move heaven and earth to fix it the next – Cazeneuve’s plan seemed well grounded. The Spaniards could not accuse the French of having sent them a mere stand-in.
The Duc had no use for the hidalgo classes, openly slapping aside their proffered family trees and coats of arms and telling them to get a job. He put himself in the path of the assassin’s bullet more than once by doing so. In one memorable (but probably apocryphal) incident, the Duc supposedly visited a failed assassin in prison and told the hidalgo that he was commuting his sentence from death to exile to the Canary Islands. When asked why, he told the annoyed gentleman that “I understand you pulled the trigger yourself – it would seem a shame to end your life so soon after you did the first work you’ve ever done in it”.
While the Duc had won the hearts of many Spanish people, we should not pretend he was universally popular, or that it was only the hidalgos who disliked him. At the end of the was still a foreign ruler and an expression of an unequal alliance with France. The Duc was also a conservative Roman Catholic by French standards, which was popular with many Spanish peasants, but less so with the urban liberals he needed to win over as well. The Duc had always been notoriously suspicious of Jansenists, blaming the UPSA’s Jansenism as the first step on a slippery slope towards inspiring Jacobin republicanism, and this hurt his relations with the Spanish urban bourgeoisie which had grown under Charles V.
There was also the rather obvious factor that the Duc was only meant to be a temporary governor, meaning that it would scarcely benefit French interests for him to become more popular than King Charles XI, who had formally claimed the throne as Charles VI (confusing matters further with New Spain) and called for a full political union. The Duc himself was always clear and open that he intended to step down ‘once the crisis is over’ and he regarded his cousin as the rightful King, publicly approving of the Franco-Spanish union. Privately, he was more sceptical of the latter the more he interacted with Spain and the Spanish people, but he remained loyal. In 1924 America’s Imperial Intelligence Corps contacted their French counterpart, the Bureau Auxiliaire des Statistiques or just ‘Auxiliaire’ for short, with supposed information that the Duc was planning to seize the Spanish throne and then try to claim New Spain as well.[12] King Charles was always dismissive of such an idea, but it did spark some paranoia within the French government. It does appear there was no truth to it, and is likely an example of the IIC being distracted by false trails laid by Societist cadres in New Spain concerning other underground movements (real and fictional) in order to obscure their own activities.
In Spain herself, opposition to the Duc and French rule manifested in a number of ways. Just as when the First Republic had overthrown Ferdinand VII, the opposition was incoherent rather than united. There were those who wanted a new Republic, divided into Portuguese-inspired extremists and Adamantine moderates (despite the ‘failure’ of the UPSA), those who wanted a new homegrown constitutional monarchy (with whom as king?) and others. A few wanted the monarchs of New Spain to return again. Most peculiar of all were those who claimed that King Charles V had actually had a son, despite the Queen’s sterility, and who was living in hiding in the mountains under an assumed name. Exactly why this would be, and why the son of a French puppet king would be preferable to direct French rule, is unclear, and illustrates that discontented people were seizing on everything. Finally, quietly hiding beneath the tumult of all the others (which they deliberately promoted as more visible) there were, of course, the cadres of the Societists.
The Duc faced a number of challenges as the war intensified. The war was initially less than popular – after all, the main selling point for French-influenced rule had been Spain being able to pursue protected neutrality during the Pandoric War. However, the Duc mostly managed to sell the war as a defensive fight against Russia, and painted a picture of the famous ‘Tsar’s Armart Legions’ sweeping through Germany, then France and then Spain. He argued it was better for Spaniards to fight with their comrades far away than wait for the Russians to cross the Pyrenees, implying that it was the Spanish boys who would make the difference and tip the balance so the French, Germans and Italians could win. If far-fetched, the propaganda seems to have worked, and Spaniards indeed volunteered.
However, discontent rose when the ‘Armart Legions’ did not materialise, and Spanish soldiers often found themselves sent to do jobs that the Italians or Portuguese were unwilling to. In particular, after the defeat of Belgium there was a push to hand off the occupation to Spaniards. Though Cazeneuve was against this, fearing it would lead to disagreements if they did not stick to the occupation zones agreed, events would force his hands. Without technically having an assigned occupation zone, Spanish troops found themselves replacing Germans, then French, then Italians in their own zones as those soldiers were withdrawn for the front line in Poland. It was not exactly the glorious, desperate battle for defence that the Duc had claimed it would be. Furthermore, it was very easy for propagandists to mock. It felt almost like a parody of Spain’s glory days under King Philip II, four centuries earlier, in which her brave soldiers had fought the rebellious Dutch in the Low Countries. Now, they were reduced to mere watchmen holding down the Belgiums. Liberal satirists painted a picture of France patronising Spain with this duty, like indulgently listening to the old stories of a dementia-stricken relative in an asylum. They began calling for, at last, Spain to seek new glories rather than perpetually dwelling on old ones.
Then, of course, came the plague.[13] Once again, the Duc through himself into a challenge with his usual vigour, leading Spain through the crisis as she faced a deadly and unseen foe. The Spanish response under the Duc, partly because of his wise appointment of capable administrators, is considered by historians to be one of the better national responses to the plague.
However, neighbouring Portugal was another matter. The Republic, a reluctant part of France’s alliance, had grown more and more paranoid as the exiled Brazilian King João VII was allowed to reside in France after the Societist conquest of his homeland. The Republicans would not accept the idea that the genial, vapid exile cared only for his own self-indulgence (and there were plenty of French aristocrats willing to indulge him as a curiosity) and had no intention of ever attempting to reclaim the Portuguese throne. In their defence, his second son Sebastião (the first, Pedro, had died fighting the Societists) might well be a different matter. Portuguese royalists and other opponents of the government were alleged to be secretly intriguing with either João or Sebastião. But the Republic could not openly send assassins after them due to the French alliance. This split the paranoid, militaristic government, and ensured any response to the plague would be undermined. The government became notorious for allegedly using death-luft to fumigate villages from plague fleas – which was a common practice elsewhere – but not always telling the people to evacuate first, or planting undesirables there and claiming they blundered into the luft cloud. Meanwhile, the Republican and military elites – now second or third generation, and as corrupt and nepotistic as the aristocrats they had overthrown in 1851 – were flouting the regulations, unwilling to concede there was a natural phenomenon not subject to their whims.
The results of all this was that Portugal was overcome by the plague outbreak, and the Duc sealed the border with Spain, hurting the economy, in order to prevent it spreading further. Naturally, the sealed border was a useful propaganda tool for the Societist cadres. Despair among the Portuguese people also meant that they were turning to someone, anyone, who might save them.
All things considered, Spain seemed relatively stable. There was upset and discontent when Spanish soldiers were asked to do certain things, but the Duc always made a good and sincere show of arguing with his cousin the King of France (and the Dictateur, the Duc de Berry) about it, standing up for Spanish interests. It seemed that there might be hope for the country after all. But, just as in the days of King Philip II, the system was only as good as one man...
[1] ‘Spain’ here is used indiscriminately to refer to the whole Iberian Peninsula, as is common in histories of this period; Portugal is not distinguished until later.
[2] This book makes a number of claims about Spain being the first to do various unpleasant things which are actually somewhat debatable – see also the mention of social stratification.
[3] The Spanish worldview actually usually describes the Americas/the Novamund as a single continent, simply ‘America’, which this author appears to have missed.
[4] The author’s view is obviously coloured by the events of TTL, although he is more willing to give the Japanese the benefit of the doubt than many of his colleagues, alluding to past greatness and giving a societal cause for Japan’s weakness rather than dismissing it as always backwards (as many incorrectly do).
[5] This is somewhat simplified, as the Enlightenment tendencies of several of the Bourbon Spanish monarchs were not as strong as implied here.
[6] This is comparable to the same for English with the USA, of course.
[7] Note that this author switches awkwardly from John to Pedro (not João or Peter) here because around the time of the Brazilian exile, Portuguese kings’ names started no longer being anglicised.
[8] The regnal numbers are confusing, because Ferdinand VII’s son Charles is also counted as Charles V as he is also claiming the crown of Spain, and we earlier heard about the important 16th century figure known as Charles V, who was actually Charles I of Spain.
[9] This is one of those quotes where nobody agrees who first said it (Napoleon is a common claim) so it is probably older than people think.
[10] These are post facto historians’ terms for the alliances of the Pandoric War, which really were more just ad hoc collections of cobelligerents.
[11] As mentioned in Part #125 in Volume III, though that House of Orléans went extinct in the male line, a female scion, Henrietta Eugénie, survived and married Francis II of Austria. The reason given for not re-establishing the dukedom is probably a tad credulous, but reflects the increased importance placed on New World matters that tends to be a natural bias of historians in TTL.
[12] The deliberately innocuous name of France’s intelligence service is similar to its OTL counterpart, the ‘Second Bureau of the General Staff’ or just Deuxième.
[13] The order of events is a bit off here.