Yeah, a POD after 1905 (and especially one during the war) necessitates an eventual descent into extremism for Russia.
Map Thread XIX
- Thread starter water123
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Doing oceanic outlines with Paint is a real pain(t) in the ass. I have to go over the entire litoral with my hands first and then a second time. But then the result is not bad.
I'd like to switch to Gimp or Paint.net but I'm having trouble adapting to new software that I'm having trouble using.
Yeah, I find most programs are really bad for outlines. It sucks, because it looks really nice.
SPLENDID ISOLATION
“In politics, evils should be remedied, not revenged.”
-Napoleon III
-Napoleon III
Humans have a tendency for forming grudges. They appear to not be very capable of letting go of a dispute, to allow themselves to turn the other cheek and let the other person go on with their day. This concept appears to function for nations, too. The Greeks hate the Turks, the Bulgarians hate the Serbs, and the Muslims hate the Hindus. However, no petty squabble between two groups has caused anywhere near the same amount of pain and suffering for all those involved other than the conflict between Albion and Gaul, between the King and the Emperor, between Britain and France.
The Franco-British rivalry has spanned for all of modern European history. Ever since William the Bastard conquered up throughout the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the island and established the Kingdom of England, the two powers have been at each other’s throats- at first for Normandy and Aquitaine, and then eventually for world domination. The hopes for the relations to mend, the hopes for a détente where the French and the British made up as the French threw off the shackles of the old Ancien Regime and flung themselves far into the modern world of enlightenment were dashed as the National Convention convened in Paris and declared war on their friends across the channel, then the Netherlands, then the rest of the planet. The British were then embarrassed as the French swept through Europe, laying waste to army after army and reaching deep like daggers into the heart of the Russian Empire. The emperor Napoleon was a god of the art of war, a master of military might who governed the French war machine with an iron fist. And when he was exiled, he would return and lead the French for 100 days forward. Finally defeated by a joint Prusso-British army at waterloo, he would see himself cast out of France for the last time, and damned to Saint-Helena for the rest of his life.
He may have been dead, exiled from France disgraced and ashamed, but his spirit and will remained. In defiance of fate, the desires and his ambitions of Napoleon would be carried on without him. The French people had been embarrassed by foreign powers, but it would not be long before it was the French embarrassing the British and Prussians. France, and its republican tradition would live on, waiting deep in the grasses and waiting to strike. The hopeful revolutionaries, hoping so dearly to finally rid themselves of the ancient regime which had so cruelly enforced its will upon the people would find this chance to strike would come sooner than later.
The state of Europe had slowly been getting more and more tense since Napoleon first spread across the continent in the name of the French Empire, with men from all walks of life desiring to see a complete end to the corrupt feudalistic regimes which had profited over the end to the French superpower. On the 23rd of February, as the dark winter gave way to Spring, the workers of the world saw their opportunity. Their opportunity to free themselves from the shackles of the monarchs, to form themselves a state for themselves and by themselves instead of one lead by some old man from some old family. In Frankfurt, friends of freedom fought for their liberation from the Viennese corruption and enforced division of the German people under many different kings with many different crowns. In Italy, the home of Rome and the Papacy, the people demanded a state for themselves. The revolutionary fervour seemed to almost be at the precipice of something far greater, the catalyst of the end of the old regimes and the birth of some new order.
In both Germany and Italy, these movements were crushed. The old order still controlled the army, and with the army, the world. The revolutionaries of both nations found themselves crushed beneath the jackboot of the old-world order. While both of these nations would eventually find themselves uniting, they would never find themselves the height of a liberal world, free from the tyrannical monarchies which they had fought so hard against.
However, not all monarchies found themselves reinstated after the revolutions. The Bourbons, having gone through so much, finding themselves at conflict with their people for so long, dealing with revolution after revolution after revolution, finally gave up the ghost, fleeing the throne for a final time as the French so gloriously saw a Second Republic form in the wake of the reactionary pushback which had stormed the rest of the western world. No longer would the French deal with the tyranny of the old world. The great Francophone march of progress had left the first two estates gone, crushed beneath the tracks as their newfound power would surely never be taken away from them by the same meddling forces as the last attempt, right?
They would be proven very wrong in this regard.
Napoleon would prove not to be the only man bearing his name who would conquer a continent. Napoleon III truly believed that he was great due to family name, and he was to bring such grand enlightened values espoused by the great thinkers of France that the rest of Europe despised and feared. Napoleon III had dreams of grandeur, and only a genius was going to stop him- with luck, that is. Napoleon had found himself with a grandiose cult of personality, being loved by his people like a king even after he had couped the liberal and democratic processes the revolution was based upon to install himself a dictator for life. It was going to take some witty and very thorough men to stop a second Napoleonic war engulfing Europe.
Napoleon III was always a pragmatic man. He had used democracy to destroy the democratic process, and now as Emperor, he needed to use these brilliant skills which he had so slyly used in the halls of complex revolutionary favours to attempt to woo the much colder and more hateful kings of the rest of Europe. He found himself fighting with the long-time enemy of the British against the Russian horde, and then immediately turned around and offered a now humiliated and weakened Russian Empire an alliance. This nigh-schizophrenic genius stupidity would dominate the foreign policy of the Second French Empire under Napoleon III, and a mix between this and mere dumb luck carried the French ascendant in the decades to come. This would soon come very well in handy, as it became clear that the French were not about to make any friends under their new emperor. Napoleon III saw himself as having a birthright over the world, and he would take any chance to expand his sphere, even if he knew it would most likely backfire spectacularly. He first set his eyes on Mexico, seeing the weakened state after the butchering away of a third of its landmass as an opportunity, a chance to build his new, grand empire which would soon come to bring rule or ruin to the world. While he found himself very successful, as the watchful giant of the American Empire to the north was busy tearing itself apart and had no need for looking outwards, Napoleon III knew that his time was numbered in Mexico, and that he had just made himself a very powerful enemy in the United States. The Mexican Empire, unable to resist the towering giant glaring daggers at Mexico City and Paris, crumbled with little resistance once the French turned their tails and fled as the American Eagle perched upon the island fortress it had made on the continent. The message from the Americans was clear: no European, and especially no Frenchman, was to carve out their own personal estate in the new world.
Instead, Napoleon III looked eastward, to the Prussian menace. The Prussians which had been expanding for too long, the eagle which looked and desired to spread its talons across Europe as the Americans had done to America, the nation hatched from a cannonball now looked to France with the same hatred and malice in their eyes as the Austrians and Danish did back. The Prussians, under the watchful eye of the mad genius and advisor to the Kaiser Otto von Bismarck desired to see the French dashed under the German heel and the Austrians left as useful idiots as he masterfully managed geopolitics to ensure that Germany would never find itself on the wrong end of a Bayonet. This luck mixed with skill had made sure that Prussia was within arm’s reach for uniting all Germans with one banner, and the idea of Germany becoming one state was sure to be an unbecoming for the rest of the European powers, so dearly clinging to their empire of old. And so, it was not particularly difficult for the French to seduce the royal families in Europe, promising vast funds and wealth to the Austrians after the common enemy of Prussia was left dead and gone and the installation of 3 powers- France, Austria and Russia, standing in solidarity against the eagle’s menace.
And when the Germans made their move and made a final strike for control of the continent, Napoleon’s triple entente struck.
Prussia had no chance for survival against the three premier powers. They found pushes out of Poland, while they felt the brunt of the Austro-Hungarian forces rush into Bavaria as the French would Reign in the Rhineland. The three premier powers over Europe carved out their own empires from the rotting corpse of German nationalism. The concept of a powerful Germany was dead, with Posen falling into Russian hands whereas Silesia fell Austrian. Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg found themselves fused by their much more powerful overlords, whereas the Prussians found their Rhinish lands torn from them by the French who Bismarck had hoped would fall easily to Germanic might. The Prussians were now as angry as those Frenchmen were 100 years ago. Their world had been crushed by a league of their adversaries; their Kaiser had left their country to rot. In the streets of Berlin, the old republican tricolour was flown over the ruined buildings, as a city became a fortress from occupation. Germany would not fall to these ancient enemies, these evil Frenchmen, these sly Slavs, and these traitorous Austrians, to their king who had betrayed their country, to Bismarck who had betrayed them, and to the fate of which had betrayed them. Germany erupted out of the ashes of the Kaiserreich like a phoenix from the ashes, and a country ablaze with the fury of a nation scorned burnt its way across the North German plain. Prussia was dead- long live the North German Republic!
In the aftermath of this great reshuffling of the affairs of Europe, the British began to get a tad worried. They had definitely used the time since they pacified the continent wisely, growing their grand empire to a massive scale and tearing down the government of the Qing, finding themselves ruling over the entirety of Asia with an iron fist. Once the British had finally realised that the rest of Europe existed, they almost instantly realised that they had a rather large issue staring them right in the face. Their ancient rivals of the French, now hegemon of western Europe, began seeing the rest of the world as other snacks for them to devour. The French, with their petty squabble with the Germans out of the way, now turned to the British as the new target of nationalistic jingoist revanchism. The world would enter the 20th century merely as a plaything, a toy, a rope in which the twin powers could play tug-of-war with.
It would also be the rope which would form the noose with which two empires would hang themselves.
Neither of France’s allied powers were on good footing before or after the war. The Russians had been on the verge of collapse before the war, with their empire overstretched and their poor weak and angry, and the Austrians had far too many ethnic groups all engaged in their petty squabbles to form any kind of national momentum or unity. The headstrong rush to battle, the naïve approach to war in the modern era was proven to be a distinctly fatal mistake, as the two nations found themselves aflame with dual assassinations leading to weak and reactionary monarchs, not able to fully withstand the great beating heart of revolution which had been birthed in their nations. Despite the massive opposition from the ruling class of both nations, Austria saw itself fully torn apart, as the Bohemians tore themselves away from the Hapsburg monarchy of Vienna while a newly freed Poland took their shot at both Silesia and Galicia. Russia’s Tsar met his fate to a bombing by an anarchist, collapsing the empire as a bloated and exhausted Russia fell to a Republic to avoid collapsing to the Red Menace which had hid in the bushes and sharpened their knives throughout Russia, watching gleefully for their chance to take the throne and install their own Red Tsar. In 1910, the spectre of Communism still haunts Europe to this day, still watching from the shadows for a time to strike and bring down the old order once and for all.
The powder keg that Europe has become is sure to break into total war any day now. Nationalist conflicts span the continent, as the Poles cry for access to German ports while the debates over the lands once held by the Hapsburg throne rage on, with no nation seeming to be able to accept their place as a mere minor and a puppet in the hands of the new powers of the modern Europe. America has finally started looking outwards from the Western Hemisphere, making sure that the French never get ideas for a third intervention into Mexico and making it clear to the British that what they have on the continent is the most they ever will. The rump Russia relies on French aid to ensure that a Russian Soviet never forms to finally destroy the parasite of the Bourgeoisie which had infected and brought Russia to its knees, however this aid has been thinning in recent years and many a socialist recognises that it may be now or never for their ideology. The world has devolved into a complex web of alliances and treaties, and the oncoming war looks to not just burn down said agreements, but the entire world order which has been developing since the end of the First French Empire.
I really like the result once the whole map has its oceanic outlines but it takes a lot of work.
Another problem with Paint is that there is no layer system. The small yellow anchor becomes very hard to superimpose with the map and requires "tinkering".
Otherwise I like your work very much, you make good administrative divisions on your cards and the colours are nice to look at. What software do you use?
Paint.net, usually. I rely on the layers quite a bit- I usually range 10-20 layers/map. One of the other great features is how the select works- flood select is really good for changing colours.
I've tried to get into Paint.net but I can't color with a solid color and I can't get the borders to color correctly. Switching from one software to another after almost 6 years of use is difficult.
Your maps motivate me to try Paint.net again.
Good to hear! The borders could be an issue with antialias- which you can't automatically turn off, for whatever reason. It definitely has some rather big flaws (like text, if you're using a lot of text on the map might be wise to convert it to a png and do everything there), but it's definitely better than when I used paint.
Attachments
The United Kingdom of Egypt:
Constituent Kingdoms of the UKE.
Flag of the UKE, bearing the blue standard of the reformed monarchy.
Just a playful idea. In a world where the Egyptian Monarchy was much stronger, they reform as a "United Kingdom of Egypt" with 5 constituent kingdoms. Also, apparently they'd be ruled by this guy:
Constituent Kingdoms of the UKE.
Flag of the UKE, bearing the blue standard of the reformed monarchy.
Just a playful idea. In a world where the Egyptian Monarchy was much stronger, they reform as a "United Kingdom of Egypt" with 5 constituent kingdoms. Also, apparently they'd be ruled by this guy:
ah its GORGEOUS. I love the old timey photo effect. Makes it feel like a REAL tourist map!Made another one of these. Tried to be a bit more ambitious about multiple elevations and a bit more in the way of pixel art type bits.
I could totally see this map on a postcard, or as a tourism board poster from the 1950s.
the USA of this map have French as official language (and English with?) with in addition multiple regional and native languages?
If anything, wouldn't there be more English speakers than French speakers?
There's probably a sizeable proportion of both, so both languages would be vehicular
I don't know about that, I just counted the current countries being either anglophone or francophone without looking at the number of inhabitants.
If it's a federal state each state could keep the language it wants?
IIRC, Nigeria had a bigger population than all of French West Africa combined.
Probably for the best.
Though...there might be a lot of provincial-level official languages on top of that.
Already at that time the Nigerian demography was so high compared to the others? After the rotten butterflies impacted the demography of all these united countries.
The states of colonization could be erased, giving way to ethnically and linguistically homogeneous regions.
But that doesn't seem easy to do (and that's why it didn't happen OTL).
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