Marche Consulaire: A Napoleonic Timeline

[TRH]

I've had this chapter mostly complete for a while, to be honest, but I didn't post it because I simply don't like it much. The inclusion of character-driven narration made me realize that I hadn't really given this enough room for the characters to breathe or to have a proper fleshed-out arc. In the end I decided to just accept this as a flawed experiment, and something to keep in mind when I plot future story arcs later on. I have been writing almost 2,000 words for the next chapter already, but it's shaping up to be a really long one depending on how I conclude some of the subplots in Poland. In the meantime, enjoy.

Chapter Fifty-Four: Cherchez La Femme…Or May The Bridges That She Burns Light The Way [1]

Excerpted from Angels and Demons: The Shadow War for the Soul of France by Mathias Gaspard, 2004.​

The Devil of Roubaix’s attack on the Braderie gripped the city of Lille with fear, but it also gave the authorities their first solid lead in the case. A public notice was put out for anyone struck ill by the killer’s arsenic products to come forward for police interviews, with the aim of identifying which street vendor had been the source of the poisoned food.

And there was no time to waste as far as the police prefecture was concerned. Police Prefect Benoît Augustin faced pressure from above and below to apprehend a suspect as quickly as possible. La Presse had brought the Devil’s existence to national attention even before 6 September, and in the wake of the Braderie attack, the paper naturally intensified his coverage alongside France’s other major publications.

To make matters worse, Editor Émile de Girardin took umbrage with Augustin’s refusal to provide information about the ongoing investigation, and decided to fill the void of official pronouncements with lurid speculation as to the killer’s identity and their potential future targets. [2]

Of course, the public dissemination of the police’s search alerted the Devil to the looming exposure of their identity. But rather than fleeing the city as a common criminal would have, they instead decided to stake everything on one spectacular gamble, one that would cement their legend in victory or in defeat.

Excerpted from The Devil’s Hand by Thibault Monet, 1912.​

Int. Lille Police Headquarters – Evening

Guillaume Dubois: That doesn’t look like one of the witness interviews we’re supposed to be transcribing, Florent.

Florent Bourdouleix: It isn’t, but if my hunch is correct, it might be even more important.

Guillaume Dubois: Oh?

Florent Bourdouleix: It’s a letter from Blaise, a friend of mine from the academy. He was assigned to Morbihan after graduation.

Guillaume Dubois: Is that so? Who did he upset to get consigned to that backwater?

Florent Bourdouleix: Blaise didn’t exactly graduate at the top of his class, but he’s sharper than people give him credit for. In any case, he wrote to me a week ago after the nuns at St. Catherine were murdered, telling me that the news reminded one of his colleagues about some unsolved cases from way back. He said the two of them would look into the department’s records for more information and that he’d write back once they found something.

Guillaume Dubois: So you hope to glean some insights into the Devil’s mindset by learning more about similar cases in the past?

Florent Bourdouleix: Exactly. To catch this criminal, we need to be able to think as he does. That’s what Vidocq says, is it not?

Guillaume Dubois: Vidocq would advocate the approach that suits him best, I suppose. But that hardly seems like an adequate substitute for diligent investigation of the matters at hand. If you try too hard to make the existing problem fit into the model of past cases, you’ll overlook the things that make each case unique. Cleverness is its own worst enemy.

Florent Bourdouleix: Cleverness is the only way we can get out in front of this case instead of just reacting to the Devil’s last move. We won’t get anywhere by recording the same half-remembered details from all ten thousand or so people who attended the Braderie this year. I’d rather be out there doing-

Police Prefect Benoît Augustin enters. Bourdouleix’s papers are scattered across the floor, and he quickly scrambles to gather them all up.

Benoît Augustin: Out there doing what, exactly?

Guillaume Dubois: Monsieur, we have some progress to –

Benoît Augustin: I should certainly hope you’ve some progress to report after three days of speaking with witnesses. Name the street vendor so we can bring them in for questioning. If the Devil was a hired hand for one of the merchants, then they’ve had all the time in the world to escape by now.

Guillaume Dubois: The festivalgoers frequented a number of places before the Braderie closed, but nearly all accounts mentioned –

Benoît Augustin: Did I stutter, detective? The name.

The detective takes a deep breath to recompose himself.

Guillaume Dubois: The victims all purchased confectionaries from Madame Lucille Gauthier, who normally maintains a bakery on Rue de l’Épinette.

Benoît Augustin: Then don’t let me keep you here. Find Madame Gauthier and bring her back here posthaste. I’ve more than enough scrutiny from higher up to deal with, but Girardin insists on complicating matters further with his sensationalist drivel.

Augustin produces a crumpled-up copy of La Presse from his coat pocket for emphasis.

Benoît Augustin: Oh good, it seems the jackals have moved on from their obsession with mad physicians. Now the Devil is a recent immigrant to Lille, “likely of German origin,” they say. I’ll admit it’s more plausible than their last theory, but they still haven’t a shred of evidence to speak of. So remember: don’t be like them, detective. Also -

An officer bursts into the room, scattering papers from the table nearest the door.

Officer: Monsieur, a fire has started on Faubourg-de-Béthune! Three buildings are already ablaze!

Benoît Augustin: Merde. What of the pompiers?

Officer: They reached the site just before I left. They fight the blaze with the help of volunteers, but the fire continues to spread! [3]

Benoît Augustin: Understaffed as always. Very well, I’ll bring the gendarmes to assist with the fire. Dubois, Bourdouleix, you both know what this likely is. Try to intercept the Devil before he escapes the city. If he slips away, we’ll all wish we’d died in the flames.

Guillaume Dubois: We won’t fail you, Monsieur. Come Florent, we may beat them to the Porte-

Dubois makes for the door, but Bourdouleix catches his arm to stop him.

Florent Bourdouleix: No, not the gates. There’s somewhere else we need to be right now. Let’s hurry, I can explain on the way.

Int. Church of St. Catherine – Evening

Parish Priest Philippe Andruet is alone, kneeling in prayer at the foot of the altar. The Devil of Roubaix enters, their face concealed by shadow as they take cover behind a column.

Devil of Roubaix: You can hear the screams of the dying from here, Father, and yet you still take the time to beg for help from a God who never answers. Old habits die hard, do they not?

Philippe Andruet: I pray for the salvation of the suffering, yes. For deliverance from the flames for those who can be saved, and for peace in the next life for those who cannot. My great regret is that I failed to help you understand this, Helene.

He finally turns to face the Devil, as Hélène Jégado steps forward from the shadows, a knife in hand.

Hélène Jégado: Oh, but I understood, old man. If you stepped out of this ivory tower and opened your eyes, you would see how little I’ve accomplished…and how much. More citizens die from simple street muggings in Lille every year than I’ve slain in five. All I have done is cast my shadow, forcing the city to see the connections between these random acts of violence. And in doing so, to recognize the truth.

Philippe Andruet: And what do you care for truth? The letter received by the newspaper was not yours.

Hélène Jégado: Of course it wasn’t. But it spoke the truth nonetheless. I’ve already won – scarred this city with a knife, a match, and a few fistfuls of arsenic. [4] I’ve shown them how little the love of the Lord or the wisdom of the Emperor is worth. The Devil’s reign over Lille will never be forgotten. But Hélène Jégado? Her memory dies with you tonight. God is not here to save you.

Guillaume Dubois: But I am.

Guillaume Dubois, emerged from his hiding place, opens fire on Jégado with his pistol, sending her sprawling. Florent Bourdouleix appears from a separate alcove to restrain her.

Philippe Andruet: Is she-?

Florent Bourdouleix: She’ll live. Probably.

Guillaume Dubois: I was trying not to kill, although that wasn’t exactly a skill I learned in the Grande Armée.

Philippe Andruet: Well, I cannot thank the two of you enough. But how did you know Hélène would come here?

Florent Bourdouleix: It was the change in modus operandi. If she had simply wanted to silence the baker who hired her to help with the Braderie, then her usual poison or knife would have sufficed. The fire suggested a twin purpose: to erase the evidence of her employment and to divert our attention from another target.

Guillaume Dubois: And for her to have targeted the three nuns who lived at this church, it was likely she had done so as well, which meant you were the only person remaining in Lille who could identify her.

Florent Bourdouleix: With Andruet dead, you could leave the city and start all over again elsewhere, isn’t that right?

Hélène Jégado: (chuckles weakly) Why not? It worked once before.

Florent Bourdouleix: In Brittany, no?

Hélène Jégado: How do you-? (breaks off, coughing)

Florent Bourdouleix: A friend did some digging and found records of a few unsolved cases of poisoning near Lorient from a few years ago. The primary suspect was not charged and disappeared shortly thereafter. That was your work, wasn’t it? [5]

Guillaume Dubois: So Blaise’s letter was fruitful after all. Perhaps Minister Vidocq is right to encourage our…criminal intuition, as it were.

Florent Bourdouleix: I think he is, but the Sûreté’s hard work and diligence also played their part. The Devil had to resort to drastic measures and got sloppy because we were closing in on her, and it took careful investigation by Blaise in Lorient to make the proper connection with the cases in Morbihan.

Guillaume Dubois: So hard work and cleverness work best hand in hand.

Florent Bourdouleix: Exactly, and that’s why I’m glad you’ve been here to guide me, Guillaume.

Guillaume Dubois: Give me no credit, I simply follow my instincts, the same as you.

Florent Bourdouleix: To good instincts, then.

Guillaume Dubois: To good instincts.

Excerpted from Angels and Demons: The Shadow War for the Soul of France by Mathias Gaspard, 2004.​

The capture of Hélène Jégado marked an end to the Devil’s grip on Lille. Jégado was remarkably forthcoming about her crimes, including the three murders she had committed in rural Brittany where she had grown up. Having lost her mother at a young age, she was sent to work with two aunts at the rectory of Bubry. Jégado attributed her resentment of organized religion and existential nihilism on the harsh upbringing she had known since childhood.

The one secret Jégado ultimately took to her grave was the true author of her infamous manifesto. She admitted to illiteracy at trial, and claimed that the letter had been dictated by her to an unnamed confederate, refusing to provide any further specifics when pressed. Since her death, there has been ample speculation that the Devil had no involvement with the writing of the manifesto at all, with the most cynical observers theorizing that the hoax had been perpetrated by a sensationalist newspaper writer to draw a wider audience to the goings-on in Lille. [6]

The repercussions of the Devil’s actions would also outlive her. Eight citizens died in the fire Jégado set, including the unfortunate Lucille Gauthier. The difficulty faced by the pompiers in quelling the blaze also underscored the shortcomings in Lille’s nascent professional firefighting service, which lagged behind the Parisian pompiers in both funding and organization. The following year, the city government raised property taxes to help pay for a complete overhaul of Lille’s fire department with little of the resistance that typically accompanies tax hikes in local politics.

The matter of Jégado’s arsenic attacks on the Braderie was harder to resolve. Inspecting the wares of the multitude of vendors that lined the streets during the festival was infeasible. Beyond stationing gendarmes to stand watch during the festivities, there was little the city government could do, so the visible show of force by the police became a part of the Braderie’s traditions. This was far from enough to assuage the lingering insecurity of the city, however, and attendance at the festival remained sparse for several years afterwards.

But in the end, the most damaging legacy of the Devil of Roubaix came about in a remote village on the banks of the Meuse. The village’s resident lector of dogmatic theology had been following the case obsessively since it appeared in La Presse, and once Jégado’s trial was over, he decided to leave the village to start a new life in Paris.

[1] I just couldn’t decide between two different titles this time, so I went with both.

[2] As a serial killer who taunts the authorities with a letter and whose activities spark a media frenzy, I was clearly taking a lot of cues from Jack the Ripper without even thinking about it. In any case, La Presse was a pro-government publication, so sensationalism about who the killer is and their motives provides an outlet to milk the story without criticizing the authorities even as they stonewall reporters.

[3] The firefighters in Paris became steadily more professional and effective over the 18th century, but as late as 1820 IOTL soldiers and ordinary citizens still wound up pitching in to help combat a particularly bad fire in Bercy, and one would expect smaller cities like Lille to lag behind in terms of the resources they could spare for their departments.

[4] Because the narration is from a play, I don’t feel as self-conscious over how stylized the dialogue and action can get. Suffice to say the actual confrontation with Jégado was less dramatic and eloquent.

[5] For background, IOTL Jégado was a serial poisoner who operated in Brittany from the 1833 to 1841, lying low for several years before going on one last spree in 1851. The move to northeastern France and the misotheism are mostly butterfly-induced weirdness, although she did get thrown out of a convent IOTL for vandalism and sacrilege, so not much reverence for religion to begin with.

[6] Apart from the Ripper parallels, I also want the timeline to have stuff that just remains mysterious because the people ITTL don’t have all the answers either. Some information gets lost to time even now.

 

[St. Just]

Hopefully the lector isn't named Hannibal, he sounds ominous enough as is.

 

[TRH]

Hopefully the lector isn't named Hannibal, he sounds ominous enough as is.

He isn't, but even though I hated writing this subplot pretty much every step of the way, I kept with it (for years IRL) because setting this guy up is that important.

 

[PeytonTucker]

Just finished reading this TL up to date. Honestly it’s my favorite I’ve ever seen on this site or any alt history forum. Hope to see this get completed one day, it’s great work!!

 

[TRH]

Alright, another change in plans. The chapter wrapping up the Easter Rebellion is mostly complete, but there's still a bit more to cover and I'm not quite sure how to resolve some dangling subplots, since I now realize I included a few too many. So instead I'm doing the chapter I planned on China right now, since last month on vacation I came across an absolutely fantastic book on the Opium War, and it was just so refreshing to have an entire book's worth of colorful, informative and directly relevant material to work with, when I usually feel like I'm stretching paltry bits of information as far as they'll go. As a result, this is the longest chapter I've ever written by far, so strap in and enjoy.

Chapter Fifty-Five: Macartney’s Revenge
Excerpted from Azure Twilight: The Waning Years of Qing China by Lewis Pryce, 2002. [1]
​

For Westerners, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty is seen as an inevitability, with the main question surrounding its fall being how a society as decadent and insular as 19th Century China managed to persist for as long as it did. For this contemporary audience, it comes as no surprise to learn that decades earlier, in the 1830s, China and the West stood on a collision course. The shock returns when the reader learns of how narrowly this confrontation was ultimately avoided.

The Chinese Opium Crisis of the early 19th Century is easy to misunderstand because the accelerants of the conflagration are better-remembered than the factors that ultimately halted its escalation. The constrictive indignity of the Canton System by which Europeans traded with China at the time is familiar ground. Under this regime, foreigners wishing to conduct trade were confined to a single city at the mouth of the Pearl River, with merchants limited to occupying a single district within Canton and travel further inland or to other ports along the coast strictly prohibited.

A British petition for exemption from the Canton system led by Lord Macartney in 1792 was rebuffed, with the Qianlong Emperor famously declaring that “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.”

The humiliation suffered by Macartney, and George III by extension, from the Emperor’s refusal to esteem the latter as an equal stung. [2] But perhaps more painful from the British perspective was the lack of interest in China for British imports.

Because of the low Chinese demand for Western goods, exports of tea, silk, porcelain and other goods were largely paid for in silver. This was an ultimately unsustainable arrangement as far as Europe was concerned, given silver’s importance to their own monetary systems. But by allowing private merchants to smuggle opium from India to China, the British East India Company had a way to replenish its silver reserves for legitimate commerce while maintaining plausible deniability with regards to participating in the illegal drug trade.

For many years, the trafficking of opium was of little concern to either side, as the drug was expensive enough that only wealthy Chinese could indulge in it. [3] But this began to change in the 1820s, as the East India Company’s opium growers in Bengal attracted competition from the Indian princely states of Malwa, as well as from the Ottoman Empire, whose opium was increasingly bought up and exported to China by French and American merchants.

Ricardian advocates of free trade argued that the British, hamstrung as they were by the Company’s monopoly over trade with China, couldn’t keep pace with their foreign competitors. The free traders carried the day upon the election of Charles Grey’s Whigs in 1831, and it was quickly decided not to renew the Company’s China monopoly in 1834, opening the floodgates to private traders. This competition depressed opium prices and paved the way towards mass consumption. It was here that the narcotic’s effects began taking their toll.

The opium trade was calculated to redress the imbalance of trade between China and the West, but due to Chinese laws, it instead unbalanced things in the opposite direction. Opium was paid for in sycee silver ingots, the same denomination used for tax payments. But because exporting sycee was illegal, Chinese merchants selling their goods in Canton could not accept it as payment, instead insisting on receiving Spanish dollars. As a result, silver sycee left the country to pay for opium but had no way to return, reversing a centuries-long inflow of the metal. This deflationary pressure had dire consequences for Chinese farmers, whose copper currency went from 1,000 copper coins per silver tael at the turn of the century to over 1,300 by the 1830s. Corruption among local government officials inflated this figure even further in practice, forcing peasants to pay up to 1,800 copper per tael, with the tax collectors pocketing the difference. [4]

Export of silver sycee abroad was strictly prohibited by Chinese law - which in turn meant accepting sycees from foreigners would implicate any Hong merchant who did so.

The inevitability of government corruption exacerbating the problems caused by the outflow of silver points to larger problems at work in late Qing China. The country’s population had more than doubled over the preceding century, the result of a long stretch of peace and prosperity along with the introduction of new crops thanks to the Columbian Exchange. But because the Qing relied on land taxes for most of their revenue, the government’s size and resources couldn’t keep pace with the needs of the citizenry.

As a result of the swelling population and stagnant size of government, the rigorous examinations that helped fill the ranks of the civil service became increasingly more desperate and prone to bribery. The officials responsible for appointing candidates to key positions began distributing jobs in exchange for payoffs, which their proteges would pay for either through embezzlement or extortion of the peasantry. The ubiquity of the latter became the spark for numerous uprisings across China, starting with the White Lotus Rebellion of the 1790s. [5] By the 1830s, matters had escalated to the point where there was a new revolt every year or two.

Chinese intellectuals were quick to blame foreigners for this disruption, but opinions varied as to how the country should respond. Although the civil service examinations notoriously focused on poetic skill and writing quality through the medium of intricately crafted essays, the 19th Century saw the rise of a new breed of Chinese thinkers grounded in more practical subjects such as agriculture, law, warfare and even economics. The leader of the statecraft scholars, as they were known, was a man named Bao Shichen.

Bao was an unlikely leader of an intellectual movement in China. He took the civil service examination 13 times over the course of his life and failed every time. Despite this, Bao’s essays found a wide audience among his fellow Han Chinese intellectuals, especially those who, like Bao himself, had succeeded in provincial-level civil service exams only to fall short at the national level. These low-level bureaucrats organised themselves and began exerting influence at the provincial level by seeking positions as assistants or secretaries to local government officials. Significantly, the statecraft scholars considered it their duty to guide and advise their Emperor, and even to correct his course if necessary. And with the opium trade on the rise, these scholars saw an urgent need for course correction.

For Bao, opium represented a dual threat. For one thing, it represented what he considered an unnecessary luxury that could not be justified in a time when the Chinese peasantry already struggled to afford daily necessities. But more importantly, he had sounded the alarm on foreign trade as a threat to China’s financial stability earlier than anyone, having advocated the expulsion of European traders from Canton as early as 1801.

Statecraft scholars like Bao Shichen hoped to modernise Confucianism into a philosophy fit to meet the challenges of the day.

Slowly but surely, others took up Bao’s hardline stance against foreign trade. In the late 1820s, the scholar Guan Tong warned that Chinese prosperity was threatened not just by opium, but by all fashionable foreign goods, from woolen fabrics to glassware to clocks. “Today, all goods imported to China are what you would call useless things, novelties,” Guan wrote. “And yet for decades now, everyone has been raving about ‘foreign goods.’ Even when it makes them poor, they continue to impoverish themselves just to take part in this fashion.”

Of course, a strong case could be made that Bao and his fellow nativists had no idea what they were talking about. Bao had never met a foreigner nor seen one of their ships when he first advocated for the banning of British textiles and clocks, and his views noticeably moderated after a stint in the hoppo’s office in Canton in the 1820s. Thinkers with a more intimate understanding of foreign interactions adopted more nuanced approaches to the country’s problems. The Cantonese provincial governor Cheng Hanzhang was a case in point, who noted the vast sums that came from legitimate trade with Europe, as well as the practical difficulties of enforcing an embargo with the outside world. Given the size of the Chinese coastline and its chronically underfunded military, curtailing all trade was quite infeasible.

That said, Cheng also recognised the dangers of opium, which he condemned as “a poison that foreigners peddle to China, harming our people while extorting millions of taels per year, silver that will leave and never return.”

But Cheng nevertheless warned against holding the foreigners directly accountable for their opium smuggling, as he had little confidence that China could defeat the British militarily. [6] He instead advocated for renewed efforts to combat drug abuse domestically by cracking down more harshly on opium smugglers and by educating the public about the dangers of opium use and helping smokers fight their addiction.

Unfortunately, by 1837 Cheng’s proffered solutions were proving insufficient to contain the spread of opium abuse, and the havoc it wrought on the country’s taxation system made its effects impossible to ignore. The question of how to solve the opium problem remained elusive, as even Shichen no longer considered an end to European trade to be realistic. The answer had to be a domestic one, and because persuading the populace to swear off narcotics had failed, the only remaining options were legalisation or a harsh crackdown on the users of opium as well as its traffickers.

Neither choice appealed to the Daoguang Emperor, as both routes offended his personal sensibilities. As a former opium smoker himself, he understood the drug’s tantalising power better than his predecessors and feared its influence all the more as a result. But to impose punitive measures on the Chinese people, who Daoguang and the entire Chinese intelligentsia saw as innocent victims of foreign predation, went against the Confucian ideal of protecting and nurturing the common folk.

Torn between two extremes, the Emperor would ultimately come down on the side of stricter prohibition. Daoguang felt his hand was forced by reports from provincial officials warning that opium abuse was paralysing local government, as bureaucrats and their assistants had taken up smoking in epidemic numbers. There was even speculation that the army had been crippled, with soldiers too addled by opium to fight. Legalisation could potentially halt the outflow of Chinese silver by replacing imported opium with homegrown stocks, but it would only exacerbate the social disruptions caused by the drug itself.

And so in April 1837, the Daoguang Emperor issued new edicts imposing strict penalties for abusing opium. He did not make the decision lightly, nor was he blind to the adverse consequences it would lead to. His advisors told him plainly that laws against opium smoking would be weaponised and turned against the citizenry by corrupt government officials. Memories of Qianlong’s latter years, when gangs of thugs went door to door extorting bribes from families under threat of death or arrest for affiliation with the White Lotus rebellion were still fresh in their minds.

To make matters worse, the syndicates that handled buying, transportation and resale of the drug after it arrived in the country often did a better job of providing for the locals in their area than the government, offering employment and protection in place of intimidation and extortion. As a result, locals were reluctant to cooperate with official investigations into opium trafficking.

Daoguang’s response to the opium crisis walked a fine line between a multitude of potential pitfalls. Thankfully, there remained several officials with the acumen and the finesse needed to thread the needle. The recently appointed governor-general in Canton, Deng Tingzhen, was a seasoned administrator who brought a level of fastidiousness and vigour that was increasingly rare in China. Under his leadership, the local authorities mounted an attack on the opium trade from all directions. Chinese ships transporting opium were hunted down and destroyed, while dealers on land were likewise eliminated, shattering the narcotic’s distribution network. At the same time, users of opium were arrested and beaten, damaging the demand side of the equation as well.

And as profitable as the opium trade had become in aggregate, the profit margins for individual actors in the business had already been tightening since the end of the Company’s monopoly, as British, Indian, American and, ironically, French speculators rushed to fill the vacuum. The additional fees demanded by Chinese smugglers in light of the harsher security climate under Deng, as well as the erosion of the Chinese consumer base cut into opium profits even further. Slowly but surely, the bottom seemed to be falling out, when the wrong man arrived from London at the right time. [7]

William John Napier was, in fact, so obviously the wrong man for the British government to dispatch to Canton that one wonders if London was hoping to spark a confrontation. Napier was a well-connected Scottish baron, a veteran of Trafalgar and a former shipmate of the Queen’s uncle William. But he was neither a diplomat nor a merchant, and yet he was chosen in February 1837 to be the second chief superintendent of trade in Canton, the official replacement for the Company men who had previously served as Britain’s liaison with the Chinese.

Napier’s appointment in spite of his lack of qualifications was the result of careful lobbying from British opium merchants in Canton, who cloaked themselves in Ricardian rhetoric to disguise their true ambitions. The first superintendent had been Sir Henry Ellis, a man whose involvement with China had begun inauspiciously with his service as third commissioner during Lord Amherst’s disastrous attempted embassy in 1816. Chastened by that experience, Ellis took pains to ensure that his tenure as superintendent was as nonconfrontational as possible. This included acquiescence to the government’s opium prohibitions, and certainly entailed no efforts to protect British opium smuggling.

For William Jardine and James Matheson, co-founders of Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the unofficial kingpins of the British opium trade, Ellis’ supine relationship with the Qing was unacceptable. But complaints addressed to London about the superintendent’s deference to Chinese authority fell on deaf ears, as continuation of Anglo-Chinese trade relations was rather the point of the position. Jardine and Matheson instead accused Ellis of stifling the growth of legitimate trade. By going to such lengths to maintain the Company-era status quo, they argued, Ellis let opportunity after opportunity slip through his fingers, to the benefit of the same Indian, American and now French competitors that had been eating into Britain’s share of the Chinese market beforehand.

Jardine and Matheson had little concrete evidence to back these assertions, but to the growing movement of free trade enthusiasts in Britain, their words had the ring of truth. The end of the East India Company’s monopoly was supposed to herald a sea change in Chinese trade policy, so to employ a superintendent intent on minimising disruption in this area defeated the purpose of the appointment. Joshua Bates of Barings, whose testimony had been pivotal in the debate over ending the Company’s China charter several years earlier, now took up the charge for a new superintendent, and Grey eventually acquiesced.

The Prime Minister only approved Napier’s appointment with great reluctance, and made a point of sending him a letter before his departure impressing upon him that “persuasion and conciliation should be the means employed in lieu of anything that could be construed as hostile or menacing.” Grey also instructed Napier not to act on his own initiative in the event of an emergency, but to acquiesce to any Chinese demands until he could receive further orders from London. Napier wrote back saying that he couldn’t agree more. In his diary, he wrote: “The Empire of China is my own.”

Lord Napier seemed unclear on whether he came to China as an ambassador or a conqueror. He was supposed to be neither.

If Jardine, Matheson & Co. had orchestrated Ellis’ ouster as superintendent in the hopes of having a more sympathetic ear towards their smuggling concerns, then with Napier they received more than they bargained for. Napier certainly was an advocate of free trade, but his reflections on his upcoming assignment depict a man who could only envision diplomacy bursting from the mouth of a cannonade. For him, China was “an Empire of 40,000,000 held together by a spider’s web,” and it would be “a simple matter for a gun brig to raise a revolution and cause them to open their ports to the trading world.”

He expressed no small amount of contempt for Ellis, Lord Amherst, the East India Company and nearly every other Briton previously responsible for Chinese relations with two exceptions: Captain John Weddell, who in 1637 had forced his way past the Tiger’s Mouth forts to open Canton to British trade for the first time, and Captain Murray Maxwell of the HMS Alceste, who accompanied Amherst on his mission and who had opened fire on the same forts following a breakdown in communications. Affinity for fellow naval officers aside, Napier’s takeaway from this history was that conciliation led to stagnation or, worse, humiliation, but appeals to force yielded more favourable results.

And due to a slow cultural shift in British attitudes towards China, Napier operated under the impression that the average Chinese resented their government and was prepared to welcome Britain and her trade with open arms. He believed this in large part because one of his chief confidants was the explorer Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, who had skirted the Chinese coast in 1832 distributing pro-British propaganda and missionary pamphlets.

Lindsay returned from the voyage claiming that the Chinese people were, contrary to their insular reputation, perfectly welcoming and friendly towards foreigners (true enough), that the Chinese government was losing the confidence of its people (overstated but not inaccurate), and that the Han Chinese majority longed to overthrow its Manchu overlords and would support an outside player towards that end (wishful thinking at best.) Based on Lindsay’s account of his China expedition, Napier fully believed that it would be a simple matter for a Royal Navy squadron to blockade the Chinese coast while disseminating leaflets attesting to Britain’s friendship with the Chinese people, who would in turn pressure the Qing to open their ports to trade for the benefit of all.

Despite his ambitions, Napier’s tenure as superintendent began with frustration. He arrived in Canton on 10 August, stepping off a small cutter in his full captain’s uniform in spite of the humidity and the monsoon rains. He carried with him a letter announcing his arrival to the governor-general. Having only just disembarked, Napier had already committed two separate faux pas. Traditionally, foreigners were supposed to wait in Macao for permission from the government to proceed to Canton, and once there, they would use the local Hong merchants as a go-between rather than converse with the authorities directly.

Napier does not seem to have been initially aware of these niceties, but neither did his missteps concern him when brought to his attention. He had been charged with revising Anglo-Chinese relations, and to do that he required validation as an equal, not a supplicant. The primary intermediary for Ellis and for Company officials before him was a Hong merchant named Wu Bingjian, known to foreigners as Houqua. By the 1830s, Houqua was an old and experienced hand both in commerce and diplomacy. He was also the wealthiest man alive. On 13 August, Houqua and a colleague visited Napier and explained the usual communication protocols to him. The superintendent ignored their request to relay his message and sent a delegation of British merchants to the gates of Canton to present his letter for delivery to Deng.

Hours passed. The British delegates entreated a slew of officials that came and went through the gates, but none would agree to deliver Napier’s message. Eventually, Houqua arrived and pleaded with the British to let him deliver the letter, but they had been ordered to disregard his assistance. After five hours in the sweltering heat ignoring Houqua and being ignored in turn by Cantonese officials, the delegation admitted defeat and returned to the factory compound, not having delivered Napier’s letter.

In the meantime, Deng Tingzhen’s war on opium was yielding decisive results. “In the city there is not a broker on the streets nor an opium pipe in anyone’s hand. They have all vanished,” Jardine wrote to one of his ship captains on the 16th. The crackdown had been a domestic affair until this point, but that was about to change. On 20 August, an opium shipment was captured just outside the factory compound, with the Chinese carrying it quickly implicating a British merchant as their employer. In response, Deng decided the time had come to send the foreign community a message.

And so on 28 August, a small group of Chinese soldiers erected a wooden gallows on the dirt plaza in front of the factory buildings to execute a Chinese smuggler. He was not a part of the group who had been apprehended in front of the factory eight days earlier, and his case implicated no foreigners. But by staging the ritual strangulation in view of the factory compound, Deng hoped to remind the British of their broader culpability.

Deng’s demonstration was poorly timed, or at least targeted at the wrong audience. Napier had still been unable to deliver his letter, and the messages he was receiving in turn requesting that he depart Canton for Macau until further notice rankled him. After nearly three weeks stuck in the factory compound stewing in bitter recrimination, the superintendent’s frustrations were reaching a boiling point, and upon hearing of the execution planned to take place on his doorstep, he took the opportunity to lash out. He ordered a group of sailors to the plaza to dismantle the gallows. The Chinese soldiers did not resist, nor did the small crowd of Chinese onlookers that had gathered. At least, not until some of the rowdier sailors began shoving their way into the crowd to disperse them. A rock was thrown, and the situation escalated as the plaza descended into fighting between Chinese and foreigners, with the British, French and Americans ultimately forced to retreat to the safety of the factory compound under a hail of stones and bricks.

The Chinese mob swelled as news of the violence spread throughout the city, and the foreigners soon found themselves besieged inside the factory compound. Napier had foreseen the possibility of a confrontation and summoned a detachment of armed sailors from outlying merchant ships to come to his assistance. The sailors opened fire into the crowd, ultimately dispersing them, but not before 21 Chinese had been killed and over a hundred more injured.

Deng, who had, upon first hearing of the siege of the factory compound, ordered additional soldiers to quell the rioters, was beside himself upon hearing of the bloodbath caused by Napier’s men. The following day, his soldiers surrounded the compound and posted a notice that trade with Britain was suspended and ordering Chinese workers to leave the factory immediately. The building was left half-empty, as bereft of its usual complement of servants, porters and guards, Napier was alone with his small party of merchants and sailors.

Napier was quick to retaliate. He ordered the frigates HMS Volage and HMS Druid to fight their way through the Tiger’s Mouth and take up positions in Whampoa “in defense of British subjects and their property.” He also sent word to the governor-general via the Hong merchants that their actions were grounds for war. By 3 September, Volage and Druid had successfully silenced the Tiger’s Mouth forts and made their way upriver to Canton. Under Napier’s orders, the ships began to bombard five forts surrounding the city itself. London was months away from even hearing news of the unfolding crisis, and yet it seemed that Napier had succeeding in defying his own government and getting the glorious war of conquest he had dreamt of. [8]

HMS Volage and HMS Druid engaged the Tiger's Mouth forts guarding the mouth of the Pearl.

Thankfully for all involved, Napier’s push for war was about to run out of steam. The captains of his two Royal Navy frigates, Henry Smith of the Volage and Lord Henry John Spencer-Churchill of the Druid, were quick to remind him of the logistical difficulties of the situation. They had expended much of their ammunition engaging the Chinese forts, which had been reinforced somewhat by Deng in recent years, and they lacked the manpower to push beyond the factory compound further into the city in any case. With the limited supply of food and water due to the siege, Napier and his fellow merchants couldn’t even stay put in the factory indefinitely. Smith and Spencer-Churchill both recommended that they evacuate the civilians in the factory compound to Macao.

As much as Napier despised this suggestion (and he wasted no time in haranguing the captains for insubordination for voicing these concerns), he couldn’t ignore the overall mood in the factory, which had turned against him. Jardine and Matheson continued to support his hardline stance towards the Chinese, but most of the British merchants blamed Napier for the shutdown of trade and the financial losses they were suffering as a result. More than the squeamishness of the frigate captains, this gutted Napier, who had taken up the role of superintendent to be the champion of the free traders. On 18 September, he finally relented, and withdrew from the factory aboard the Druid bound for Macao.

It would be another five months at least before he could expect new orders from London, and despite his instinct towards more aggressive action, Napier understood that waiting was his only remaining option. He lacked the authority to order additional naval forces to assist him, and although British India was much closer than England, he had well and truly burned his bridges with the Company and could expect no help from them either.

In London, Grey and his Cabinet could only greet the news coming in from China with a slowly mounting sense of disbelief and horror. Their new superintendent had gone rogue so immediately and so drastically that the only explanation for Napier’s behaviour was deliberate mendacity in pursuit of a personal agenda. And because communication with Canton was so slow, Britain could find itself irrevocably committed to war in China before Napier even received a reprimand.

On 1 March, the clipper Sea Sprite left England bound for Canton. On board was Sir Charles Elliot, whom the Cabinet had chosen to replace Napier as superintendent only three days beforehand. Sea Sprite was among the speediest ships afloat at the time, but Elliot could still expect to several months at sea before reaching his destination. The long wait frayed on the nerves of the already anxious Elliot, who was certain he would be greeted by utter catastrophe upon his arrival.

In Macao, the man Elliot was to replace had sunk into depression. Napier, who had dreamt of conquest and glory from his assignment to China, was now stranded on a Portuguese-controlled island, the laughingstock of the Euro-American community. Smith and Spencer-Churchill had shattered what remained of his delusions of authority, telling him that they had forced passage through the Tiger’s Mouth solely because they believed that British citizens were in danger and in need of rescue. Now that the factory had been successfully evacuated, they had no interest in pursuing hostilities any further, and they did not answer to a superintendent of trade. For their part, the merchants who had fled Canton with him were (with the exception of Jardine, Matheson and almost no one else) incensed by the prolonged shutdown of trade, a crippling financial burden that they laid at his feet.

Faced with this pressure, Napier’s spirits sagged. Any reply from London was still months away, but if the sentiments of his countrymen in Macao was any indication, he could no longer expect the acclaim he had hoped for when he had accepted his appointment. Besides Jardine and Matheson, the only people in the city who still welcomed his presence were his wife and daughters, who had remained behind while he had gone ahead to Canton, as women were forbidden from coming to the factory. But even being reunited with his family was a meagre consolation, as Napier’s health took a downward turn. Pale and feverish, he confessed to his wife that he would likely never again see English shores.

In the meantime, Grey was fighting for his political life back home, as his government was assailed from all corners over the unfolding crisis in China. The Prime Minister was quick to remind people that he had given explicit instructions forbidding Napier from even considering the rash actions he had taken, but this was an unsatisfying defense. Grey “had certainly taken measure of Lord Napier’s temperament, and still saw fit to award him an office he was manifestly unsuited for,” The Times observed. The Conservatives under Sir Edward Knatchbull took the opportunity to chastise the Whigs not only for China, but also the ongoing irregular war against the Māori in Aotearoa, accusing Grey of “instigating conflicts a world away for the sake of idealism and passing fancies.” [9]

But the deepest cut was delivered not by the Conservatives, but by the Canningite rump party that remained in a coalition with the Whigs. Their leader, Foreign Secretary Lord Melbourne, could not personally lead the attack on Grey over Napier’s actions given that he was the superintendent’s direct superior. The knife would instead be wielded by Sir George Staunton.

Staunton was universally considered the West’s foremost expert on China and its people. As a 12-year-old boy, he had accompanied his father on Lord Macartney’s mission to China, where he impressed the Qianlong Emperor with his rudimentary grasp of the Chinese language. He then spent nearly twenty years in Canton, rising to become chief of the Company’s factory. His proficiency with Chinese also improved, and in 1810 he published an English translation of the Great Qing Legal Code. Eventually, Staunton returned home and was elected MP for Portsmouth, having won a reputation as a Sinologist that even the likes of Napier could grudgingly respect.

Despite his expertise on the matter at hand, Staunton was nearly as notorious for his profound lack of rhetorical skill. He had only addressed the Commons once before, during the debate over ending the East India Company’s Chinese monopoly in 1832. Staunton, as a lifelong Company man, had prepared a lengthy and detailed speech outlining the challenges and potential pitfalls that could result from lifting the monopoly, backed by his own extensive history of dealing with the Chinese people.

Unfortunately, nobody heard his case. Literally so, as the socially anxious Staunton delivered his points in a shy mumble that was barely audible, stopping and starting along the way to consult his notes. Finally, he found himself cut short mid-speech as a member called for a headcount – the speech had been so unengaging that members had slowly trickled out of the chamber the entire time, to the point where the House no longer had a quorum. Such was his humiliation, that Staunton promised himself never to expose himself to potential embarrassment for the rest of his career.

This history made it all the more surprising for the Commons when its least charismatic member rose to make his observations about Napier’s War, as the press had come to call it. Mindful of his previous failure, Staunton promised to keep his remarks short. True to his word, he spoke for less than a minute.

“For two hundred years, England and China have co-existed in peace and friendship, bringing wealth and good fortune to both,” he said. “Now this peace is torn asunder. It is sacrificed for greed, for martial glory, for ‘freedom of commerce.’ How…Bonapartist this government has become.”

Staunton quickly returned to his bench. The standing ovation that swept the chamber startled him as much as anyone.

On 15 August, the Sea Sprite finally reached Macao. Elliot was relieved to hear that there had been no massacre of the Westerners at the factory compound. Unfortunately, this was relayed to him by a grieving and furious Lady Napier. Her husband had passed ten days earlier. The distraught widow pleaded with Elliot to finish what Lord Napier had started, but his orders were clear. He had come to stop a war, not to continue one.

The long wait had the advantage of cooling tensions in Canton, and once Elliot relayed a message to Deng via a Portuguese merchant that the previous superintendent was dead, the governor-general quickly gave permission for his successor to proceed upriver to reclaim their place at the factory compound. Negotiations conducted via Houqua went smoothly and the two parties were able to negotiate a resumption of trade, with the Hong merchant generously agreeing to pay the damages caused by the earlier confrontation outside the factory walls. [10]

This peaceful resolution to Napier’s War was welcome news in Britain. It was also too late to save Grey’s government. With Staunton’s laconic skewering of the Whigs as a cover, Melbourne resigned from the Cabinet and, along with his fellow Canningites, withdrew from the coalition. The election of July 1840 saw only modest gains for Melbourne’s party, but Knatchbull’s Conservatives were swept into power on the back of Grey’s colonial embarrassments. Lord Ashley, the new Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, denounced the opium trade as one of the aggravating factors for the crisis, declaring that British merchants should no longer take part in its trafficking. [11]

Ashley’s declaration wasn’t followed by legislative action, but that wasn’t necessary. Deng Tingzhen’s campaign against opium had already been making progress before Napier’s arrival, and the protracted interruption of trade had devastated the industry, putting many merchants and firms out of business. Jardine, Matheson & Co. survived for several years longer, but once the Trust in America demonstrated the power of corporate consolidation, the company was eventually acquired by Barings in 1849.

Of course, the end of the Chinese opium trade meant a return to Europe’s original problem with its trade, the slow loss of its silver supply. No substitute export for opium found a similar purchase in the Chinese market, so the only remaining solution was to reduce trade by finding alternative sources of goods imported from China. In particular, European powers opted to cultivate tea elsewhere in Asia. The British had already introduced tea to grow in India before Napier’s War, but in the 1840s, other countries began to follow their lead. This was an especially important project for France, because Napoleon’s introduction of bimetallism made silver a precious resource for the same reasons it was valued in China.

As if to vindicate Staunton, Napoleon II responded to the end of the opium trade with a classic campaign of gunboat diplomacy against Dainam in May 1841. [12] The Dainamese Emperor Minh Mạng had closed his country off from foreign influence, banning missionaries in 1825 and demanding that French ships be given particular scrutiny. Minh Mạng’s military was no match for that of France, and he was forced to rescind several of his isolationist policies after the French navy subjected several port cities to a devastating bombardment. A French diplomatic delegation led by Jean-Baptiste Chaigneau offered several incentives as part of an otherwise unequal treaty, including a trade deal for importation of Dainamese tea that became an important source of government revenue in the following decade.

The other colonial power that tried to reduce its dependence on China through imperialistic measures elsewhere was the Kingdom of Holland. Napoleon I’s brother Louis died in 1842, leaving his son Louis Napoleon to be crowned Louis II of Holland. The new king had exchanged regular correspondence with his cousin Napoleon II since their adolescence, making him one of the few people to maintain steady contact with the secretive French emperor. From his younger cousin, Louis II learned the importance of considering economics in statecraft and using lateral thinking to achieve one’s goals. Faced with the prospect of Chinese tea becoming more expensive, he realised the potential to grow the crop in the Dutch East Indies. [13]

In China, the Daoguang Emperor felt satisfied with Deng’s performance and the overall outcome of the crisis. A domestic opium trade still existed, but its scale was much more manageable and it carried no implications for the monetary system. Moreover, the threat of withholding trade seemed to have been successful in forcing Great Britain to back down, as it had when the British had attempted to occupy Macao in 1808. What Daoguang overlooked was that his empire had deeper structural issues that were not addressed by the curtailing of opium trafficking. The old problems of corruption and overpopulation would continue to plague China for decades to come.

[1] I would never have been able to make this chapter what it is without the wealth of information I got from reading Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age by Stephen Platt. Several of the quotes from this chapter are paraphrased from that book. The two I kept verbatim were the one from Qianlong to Macartney due to its fame, and that one by Napier, you’ll know which one, to show that he was, in fact, that nuts.

[2] In a fit of sour grapes, Macartney declared afterwards that China, far from being the shining and exotic utopia Voltaire and other Westerners had described, was decadent, ignorant and on the verge of revolution. The White Lotus Rebellion happened only a few years afterwards, making him accidentally prophetic.

[3] This is why the opium trade, although it had begun long before this timeline’s POD, didn’t really become a huge problem until the 1830s. Before then, only elites could afford to buy expensive foreign opium, with its status as a luxury good being the reason people preferred it to domestic stock.

[4] These were OTL price movements. There’s a bit more opium entering the market with the French getting in on the game, but on the other hand, the Argentinians strip mining Potosi to pay for their war of independence put some more Spanish silver on the market as well, so it’s ultimately a wash.

[5] Corruption also prolonged said rebellion, as provincial governors would pad the payrolls of their private armies with fictitious names so they could pocket the extra wages, among other shenanigans.

[6] Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese weren’t completely ignorant of Western military capabilities, and Chinese with experience in Canton were especially aware that the British ships bristling with cannons more advanced than anything they had would be more than they could handle, especially since the Qing navy was close to nonexistent at this point. Any complacency on their end mostly stemmed from the belief that trade was too lucrative for the British to risk jeopardizing it by starting a war.

[7] My main takeaway from Platt was that the Opium War was actually extremely easy to avoid because it only came about as a result of very specific personality clashes and misunderstandings that got out of hand. Neither side wanted a war, and the British government would never have started one simply over opium. It was only once the conflict became a question of national honor that Palmerston (who smacked Napier down IOTL) and others got behind it. So to change things I decided to combine two separate incidents, Napier’s stint as superintendent plus a war scare over the execution of a Chinese opium smuggler. By re-centering things around Napier as the villain instead of a series of accidents, I allow both sides to pin the blame on a rogue individual and walk away satisfied, with the opium trade collapsing on its own due to the already precarious financial position the traders were in as a result of market saturation plus the slow resolution of the crisis.

[8] Travel from Britain to Canton could take up to six months at this time, in part because of monsoons.

[9] In line with what Senator Chickpea told me a while ago I retconned the end of the New Zealand chapter to make it so the British began a campaign to conquer the islands in the 1820s, but it became a lengthy slog. One started by a Tory government, but at least Knatchbull wasn’t in the government at the time, so he’s still being less of a hypocrite about this than Melbourne.

[10] This may sound insane, but the Hong merchants were supposed to take responsibility for the behavior of the foreign traders they worked with, and Houqua got tortured by Lin Zexu to pressure the British in the runup to OTL’s Opium War. And yes, he was so ridiculously rich that he could foot this bill by himself.

[11] Lord Ashley was the first president of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade IOTL.

[12] The Nguyễn dynasty renamed the country to Dai Nam for a while in the 19th century, as a shortening of the previous name Dai Viet Nam.

[13] Wanted to go into detail on this too, but this chapter’s a monstrosity already, and I’m planning to return to Southeast Asia soon, so it’ll have to wait.

 

[TRH]

Just finished reading this TL up to date. Honestly it’s my favorite I’ve ever seen on this site or any alt history forum. Hope to see this get completed one day, it’s great work!!

Thanks, man, glad to have you along for the ride! I've expressed concerns about the pacing of the story and my update speed before, but I'm beginning to make peace with it because I think the depth and quality of my research is much higher than when I started. The first 10+ chapters were based almost entirely on Wikipedia, but thankfully I'm much better about tracking down more specialized work nowadays.

 

[Pempelune]

Fascinating update! China looks like it might stave off western greed for a while longer, though I expect at some time this will stop working. China can't sustain an embargo if the western powers unite on the issue, as they did OTL.
It's fun seeing Britain starting to take a position against colonialism and gunboat diplomacy. It'll likely remain a fig leaf, mind, but perhaps it will moderate some of the worst excesses.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Great update, and I appreciate you adjusting the Aotearoa subplot.

 

[TRH]

Fascinating update! China looks like it might stave off western greed for a while longer, though I expect at some time this will stop working. China can't sustain an embargo if the western powers unite on the issue, as they did OTL.
It's fun seeing Britain starting to take a position against colonialism and gunboat diplomacy. It'll likely remain a fig leaf, mind, but perhaps it will moderate some of the worst excesses.

China also can't take a fight against a European power that's willing to just bite the bullet and fight through an embargo, unfortunately. One of the other results of the White Lotus Rebellion was a heavy downsizing of the Chinese military afterwards. In the early 1800s, their coasts were plagued by pirates whose fleets were stronger and larger than the Emperor's, and they were only able to defeat them by essentially bribing the pirates so generously that everyone was willing to go home.

As for the British, what really mattered here is that there was no political will for a war with China for the sake of trade because war would shut down said trade. So even if you beat the Chinese and got lucrative trade concessions, there's still a heavy upfront cost that they aren't willing to pay. As I said, the OTL Opium War started accidentally and was committed to out of honor more than realism, so in a situation where the man on the scene was openly disobeying orders, it's clear he's the one besmirching British honor, not anyone on the Chinese side.

Great update, and I appreciate you adjusting the Aotearoa subplot.

I had meant to correct that a long time ago, but editing old chapters is one of those things I said I was going to do but fell by the wayside. I may return to revising that chapter in more detail later, since I've purchased a book on Australian history that might flesh out that part of the chapter. I was never super enthused with the Australia-focused bits since I didn't really have anything as exciting as the MacGregor madness or even the Canadian political drama.

 

[TRH]

Five years have passed since I began this little project. Naturally, my own life has changed quite a bit during that time. When I first started writing for this, I'd recently dropped out of my social science master's at the University of Chicago because I was burnt out and decided academia wasn't for me. I passed the time with a pretty undemanding internship that left me plenty of time and energy to throw into alternate history writing. Since then, I completed a master's in journalism, started my first proper job as a business reporter, and three weeks ago jumped ship to a bigger company that's thankfully shaping up to be much less of a grind. I don't really expect to return to the feverish productivity of the story's early days, but I'm optimistic about where my writing can go from here.

That being said, I've also taken up a new project recently. Shortly after the last update, I decided to put the timeline on hold for a couple months to start writing a Death Note fanfic. It's been an interesting experience where I've adopted an entirely different writing style, and I've found it invigorating. It's not really fair to compare word counts between something research-intensive like this and a fanfiction where dialogue can inflate the word count by a lot, but over the last two months I managed to write just shy of 60,000 words. Now thankfully, this fanfic isn't nearly as ambitious as Marche is, and I expect to complete it within the year. So I'm definitely not abandoning Marche entirely, but I'll be splitting my time between the two stories for a while.

In the meantime, we've got the tragic end of the Easter Uprising on our hands. Like I mentioned before, I want to make a proper outline of chapters for the 1840s before I continue, so not immediately sure what the next update will be about. I'm damn sure it won't take another four years to complete the decade though, that's a promise. But until then, I want to thank everyone again for sticking with this little project for all these years, and enjoy!

Chapter Fifty-Six: Misty Tales and Poems Lost [1]

Excerpted from The Road to War: 1830-1852 by Alexander Peterson, 1971.​

In London and Paris, the messy and inconclusive Kaunas campaign brought the Easter Rebellion into a new and dangerous phase. Both Lord Grey and Napoleon II had reached the conclusion that the Polish rebels were doomed to failure, but British and French public opinion disagreed. For the general public, reporting from the front lines of the conflict was sparse. As a result, the Polish capture of Kaunas was more widely known than their defeats preceding it.

This put the two governments in a difficult position. The conflict had exposed the Russian military as a paper tiger, which diminished the need for the Anglo-French Entente. The alliance had been predicated on the assumption that Russian support would tip the balance in a future confrontation between Britain and France, so the dismal early performance of the Russian army made alignment with Russia by either power simultaneously less valuable and less provocative. Both governments instinctively began looking for ways to wind down their involvement with the Easter Rebellion, but the drumbeat for greater involvement in both Britain and France only grew more intense as 1835 dragged on. [2]

As for the Poles, the Kaunas campaign gave Prądzyński cause to reconsider his offensive strategy against Russia. The ability of the Russians to trade space for time was already paying dividends, as a second Russian army under Ivan Paskevich had assembled in Minsk and was preparing to advance on Vilnius. The combination of attrition and the slow but steady mobilisation of the Russian military had now swung the balance of forces decisively away from the rebellion.

The threat posed by the fresh force of Russians made it clear that any hope for the Poles to capture or even threaten St. Petersburg was now thoroughly dashed. Prądzyński sent new orders to General Skrzynecki in Kaunas, halting the planned campaign against Riga until further notice. He also recalled General Radziwiłł’s forces to help defend Vilnius. More surprisingly, though, Prądzyński relieved Radziwiłł of command of his army, saying that he would take the field to personally see to the defense.

This seemingly inexplicable choice on the part of the chief of staff is best understood as the product of exhaustion, pessimism and paranoia that plagued Prądzyński as the Easter Rebellion slowly unraveled. Thanks to Skrzynecki’s reports, he now thoroughly mistrusted Radziwiłł’s competence for field command of any kind. And with the dearth of Polish generals who believed in the possibility of success, Prądzyński felt he had few reliable allies to entrust the defense of Vilnius to instead.

Lastly, we cannot discount the likelihood that the general, exhausted by the political gridlock and intrigue underway in Warsaw, hoped that assuming a field command would help return him to more comfortable surroundings. Or failing that, to fall with dignity alongside his countrymen in their latest struggle for independence.

Of course, General Prądzyński’s decision to take the field left the duplicitous Wincenty Krasiński as the highest-ranking officer remaining in Warsaw. But even without the fear of betrayal from the rear, Prądzyński had an imposing challenge before him to hold Vilnius. Paskevich’s army numbered over 100,000 men, and even with the recall of Radziwiłł’s army from central Lithuania there were only 70,000 Polish and Lithuanian troops available for the city’s defense.

But despite the odds, the Easter Rebellion was not ready to go quietly. The half-finished trench network begun by General Diebitsch to protect the city’s southern and southeastern approaches was refurbished and expanded. And although the influx of smuggled supplies from Western Europe had by now slowed to a trickle, Prądzyński managed to ensure that the defenders were as well-provisioned as possible given the circumstances.

These provisions included one final surprise for the Polish to unleash against Paskevich and his army. Thanks to their British supporters and the ingenuity of one Colonel Józef Bem, the Poles had a battery of Congreve rockets to supplement their defenses. After years of experimentation with the weapon in the Warsaw Arsenal, Bem and his engineers had improved on British designs by introducing a form of multiple rocket launcher to enhance their destructive potential. At Vilnius, the Polish Rocketeer Corps would face its trial by fire. [3]

The second battle of Vilnius was the bloodiest clash of arms in Europe since Pressburg a quarter century earlier. As expected, the Russian army opened with a two-pronged assault from south and southeast of the city, charging into the teeth of the Polish defenses. The rebels had erected two redoubts overlooking the southern approach and another three guarding the southeast, with a network of trenches between them.

As imposing as these defensive structures were, however, they were also too extensive for the Polish army to adequately man. Paskevich seemed to have understood this, and conducted a series of feints and probing assaults to test the defenses for weak points as well as the vigour of the defenders in responding to his moves. This anticipatory phase of the battle lasted for several days. Finally on 8 March, the Russian army attacked in earnest.

Paskevich chose to concentrate his efforts on Šnipiškės Redoubt, the easternmost of the two southern forts, as well as on the Šeškinė Redoubt at the center of the southeastern approach, reasoning that their capture would force the entire Polish line to retreat for fear of being cut off. Despite this, there was no way to prevent the assault from degenerating into a bloody slog, as the defenders’ musket fire and rocketry inflicted a grievous toll on the attacking Russians.

Of course, the Russians were well-supplied with their own artillery, and thanks to their observations during the preceding days of skirmishing, Paskevich’s army had identified the likely positions of the defending guns to focus their counterbattery fire. By 11:00 in the morning, they had successfully silenced the battery guarding Šeškinė Redoubt. With this accomplished, Paskevich ordered an assault on the fort, with the Finland Guard Regiment leading the charge.

Russian and Finnish forces storming Šeškinė Redoubt.

The Poles and Lithuanians defending Šeškinė exacted heavy casualties on their assailants, but the superior numbers of the attacking army made their mark, and the redoubt fell by noon. As a result, Prądzyński ordered his forces to pull back towards secondary defensive positions inside the city proper, where crude earthworks and sangars had been prepared.

And so Vilnius once again had the misfortune of witnessing street-to-street combat between the Polish and Russian armies. Paskevich, having learned from his own experience with the often fanatical defenses he had encountered in Circassia, made use of his artillery as much as possible to clear the way for his advancing infantry, laying waste to much of the city in the process.

This decision compounded Catherine III’s growing reputation for brutality across Europe, but the casualty figures speak for themselves. In the end, over 27,000 Poles and 19,000 Russians fell by the time Prądzyński conceded the city, in addition to thousands of Lithuanian civilians caught up in the fighting.

The First Battle of Vilnius demonstrated that the Easter Rebellion had a fighting chance of overcoming the Russian Empire. As such, it was only fitting that its recapture marked the beginning of the end for the dream of an independent Poland. Prądzyński was ultimately forced to retreat northwards across the Neris River with just over half of his army remaining. His position was difficult for geographic reasons as well as numerical ones at this point, with Paskevich threatening to cut the line of retreat back to Poland. The former dictator proceeded towards Kaunas with the intent of linking up with Skrzynecki’s army when tragedy struck.

The burden of responsibility for the rebellion had weighed heavily on Prądzyński from the beginning, and members of his staff observed that the general tended to sleep four hours or less a night, consumed as he was by his mission. This stress took its toll on him, and during the retreat from Vilnius it manifested as a bout of pneumonia. Prądzyński was quickly relegated to a chaise for the march to Kaunas, but he would never reach the city. On 16 March, the general succumbed to the disease.

Prądzyński’s death represented another blow to already flagging Polish morale. It is a testament to the respect Skrzynecki had earned among the rank and file in his own right that he was able to take charge of the army, but his position remained precarious. The Poles, already exhausted from nearly two weeks of hard marching and fighting, would need to move quickly to avoid getting caught between Kotlyarevsky and Paskevich.

Fortunately for them, Paskevich showed little urgency in continuing his advance, feeling he had outrun his supply lines. Meanwhile, Plater’s cavalry provided an effective screen against Kotlyarevsky. Deprived of intelligence on Polish dispositions or Paskevich’s exact position, Kotlyarevsky hesitated to act aggressively. By playing into the conservativeness of the Russian commanders, Skrzynecki was able to extricate his army from an untenable situation, crossing the Neman at the town of Kalvarija to the safety of Polish territory where he could rest and regroup.

But as swift as Skrzynecki’s retreat had been, the news of Prądzyński’s death had been swifter, and the political tensions that had been brewing in Warsaw finally boiled over.

As the most senior officer remaining on the General Staff, Wincenty Krasiński declared himself Prądzyński’s successor as Chief of Staff. This move was highly irregular considering the Count had only rejoined the military relatively recently, but disregard for the proper chain of command had been a fixture of the Easter Rebellion from the beginning. The shell-shocked and demoralised leadership in Warsaw let it pass. After all, there was a more immediate danger to order in the capital.

Andrzej Towiański had built up a substantial following among the dispossessed in Warsaw at the peak of the rebellion’s strength. Now that the Easter Uprising had lost its leader and was unraveling in the field, Towiański’s millenialist ideology resonated all the more strongly, and its ranks exploded. The cult’s membership reached an estimated total of nearly 10,000 in the capital. [4] This made the movement large enough to become a major player in the capital’s political scene – but it also made them large enough to become a target.

On 30 March, Count Krasiński made his move. The permissiveness of King John and General Prądzyński had allowed malcontents and radicals to fester unchecked in the capital, he argued. This disorder was contributing to the political paralysis in the Sejm, which in turn had sabotaged the army’s performance in the field. The only way forward was to restore order and a clear chain of command on the home front.

Given the Count’s political sympathies, this rhetoric was almost certainly a pose. Nearly all of the other actors involved in the waning days of the conflict agreed that Krasiński’s true intention was to use his position of influence to end the rebellion and submit Poland to Catherine III’s authority once again. Few of Krasiński’s writings survived the subsequent upheaval, but whatever his true motivations, he saw an opening to seize power and took it.

As such, Krasiński declared himself dictator and indefinitely suspended the Sejm. And his first order as dictator was to arrest Andrzej Towiański for sedition, while using the army to forcibly disband the Towiańskiites and expel them from the city.

Wincenty Krasiński tried to exploit the leadership vacuum in Warsaw to end the rebellion from the inside.

Krasiński’s attempted coup went awry from the start. For one thing, he was unable to detain Towiański, who had seen the writing on the wall from the moment dictatorship had resumed and gone to ground. Worse, his attacks on the cult itself met unexpected resistance.

Perhaps anticipating the need to keep friendly relations with members of the military, Towiański and his followers had provided modest amounts of food and financial support to widows and other family members of fallen soldiers. This not only left the city garrison less than enthused with their orders to disperse the Towiańskiites, it also resulted in elements of the army stepping in to defend them. [5] The confusion was exacerbated by the Patriotic Society, whose members denounced Krasiński and began mobilising their own military supporters for a counter coup.

For three days, Warsaw was locked in a struggle between soldiers loyal to Krasiński and those who followed the Patriotic Society, with the Towiańskiites caught in the middle. Towiański himself had realised the city was no longer safe for him, and escaped in the confusion. His followers weren’t so lucky, and the presence of large numbers of homeless and terrified civilians in the crossfire made the fighting all the more difficult for both sides.

Although they were unarmed, the presence of the cultists still had a meaningful impact on the fighting. Krasiński’s orders to attack and remove desperate refugees from the capital weighed heavily on the morale of his troops, and by mid-afternoon on the 31st this had manifested in large-scale defections to the Society. The following day, Krasiński concluded that his position was untenable and attempted to flee the city himself. Unfortunately for him, the Patriotic Society managed to intercept his escape, and the would-be dictator was riddled with bullets.

With Krasiński dead, the Easter Rebellion was forced to choose a new leader for the fourth time in a year. Lieutenant Wysocki of the Patriotic Society, having advocated the dissolution of the Sejm for months by this point, appointed himself dictator. Wysocki was eager to abolish Polish serfdom in addition to implementing a raft of other social reforms from the Society’s programme.

Sadly for him, he wouldn’t get the chance to do so. On 14 April, he received an urgent missive from the field. Paskevich’s army was advancing on Warsaw, and with Kotlyarevsky’s army at the heels of Skrzynecki, his forces would be unable to reach the capital in time to defend it.

The irony is staggering. Just over a year earlier, Piotr Wysocki had, along with Colonel Józef Zaliwski, set the Easter Rebellion in motion, organising their fellow army officers to cast off Russian oppression. Despite his dream of a grand remaking of Polish society, Wysocki had then entrusted command of the war to less ambitious men. Now that he had taken charge himself and could finally work to make his vision a reality, reality had reasserted itself, dashing his hopes.

The capriciousness of fate was too much for the Lieutenant. The day after he’d been warned of Paskevich’s looming arrival, Wysocki ordered the evacuation of as many soldiers, political leaders and refugees from Warsaw as possible.

Two days after that, the instigator of the Easter Rebellion took his own life.

Excerpted from Adventures while Prosecuting Researches and Inquiries on Polish Matters by Joachim Lelewel, 1865.​

After the tumult caused in the city by Count Krasiński’s failed bid for power, the inevitable arrival of the Russian army and the retribution it promised seemed almost an afterthought. A third of the Sejm’s deputies had already chosen to flee the capital once news of the fall of Vilnius arrived, and by the time the Patriotic Society had provided our unlikely deliverance from anarchy, those citizens who remained consisted of three sorts.

There were the dispossessed with no safe haven, those who had kept the faith in their Empress and expected quarter, and a final camp of two: myself, for whom morbid curiosity as to the final days of our rebellion outweighed my good sense, and the King, who remained behind for reasons I may never fully understand.

Certainly I asked the King about it roughly twice a day as Paskevich approached, and his answer meant enough that I risked my own escape in hopes of satisfaction. For several days, his only answers were platitudes about holding to principle, but what principles he could not say. I think he himself was unsure, or at least could not quite put his feelings into words. Finally, the night before I had resolved to take my own leave of Warsaw, the King came to his answer.

Evening services in churches across the city had concluded, and as the congregants filed out into the streets, the sound carried even to the two of us overlooking the scene from Belweder. Their voices were not the disparate and fearful cacophony that all had grown accustomed to, however. The words were indiscernible from our distance, but thousands of voices were united in song, and the melody stirred something in both of us. I knew not what it was, but the King did.

“This is an expression of hope, Joachim,” John said. “But not the hope our rebellion was built on, the hope for victory and liberty. This is the hope for forbearance; the hope that even as Poland dies once more, life will go on for the Polish people.”

I was not immediately convinced.

“Surely to call that hope is to do the emotion a disservice,” I said.

“It is not a fantastic sentiment, no,” he conceded. “It is not the hope of a dreamer, but the hope of a man wide awake, something that reminds him to live instead of dying for a shattered dream. And that is the only hope most of the people of this city can hold onto, you know. The Sejm can return to exile, and our soldiers can lay down their arms in Prussia to hold out hope for another day, but the common citizenry lack the means for such a flight.”

“And that is why you intend to stay? A gesture of solidarity with those who have no recourse but to make their peace with the Russians?”

“It’s not much of a gesture,” he admitted. “But it’s all I can offer now. I don’t doubt that I will eventually be allowed to return to Saxony with minimal punishment. But when I consider what Katya would do in my position, I cannot imagine that she would hesitate to abandon her capital and her people to save herself. So that is why I stay, because I know that she would not.” [6]

Still I did not feel as though I grasped the entirety of John’s reasoning, but this much I could understand. I will not belittle the memory of the fallen by calling the Saxon prince’s stand on principle heroic in the traditional sense, but it spoke to a determination to rise above one’s helplessness that earned my utmost respect.

Excerpted from The Road to War: 1830-1852 by Alexander Peterson, 1971.​

With Warsaw fallen and the rebel leadership in disarray, the Polish army quickly began melting away. Unusually, this involved every avenue of escape besides surrender to the advancing Russians. The borders separating Poland from Austria, Prussia and the Confederation of the Rhine had all been sealed since the uprising began, but when the alternatives were execution or exile to Siberia, this was no longer a deterrent.

Skrzynecki’s army represented the largest single concentration of Polish soldiers remaining, and over the first week of April, over 30,000 soldiers joined the General in crossing the border into East Prussia to lay down their arms. Another 20,000 Poles and Lithuanians managed to escape into Austria, Saxony and Westphalia before Kotlyarevsky and Paskevich could secure the borders. [7] This wave of refugees marked the beginning of the Great Emigration from Poland and Lithuania during the mid-19th Century.

In addition to Skrzynecki, the escapees also included Joachim Lelewel, Józef Bem, Emilia Plater and a young cadet named Antoni Aleksander Iliński, among many others. Unfortunately for all involved, this number also included Andrzej Towiański. [8]

These individuals, possessed of a uniquely Polish spirit of defiance in the face of bitter defeat, resolved to carry on the fight for their homeland’s independence even from exile in the various German states. And when this indomitable will to survive was intertwined with new strains of political thought emerging in Germany, the results would upend Europe’s conception of the nation-state.

[1] To be honest, I initially included this Blind Guardian reference just because it sounded cool. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. And Then There Was Silence is all about the multitude of different emotions that go through people’s minds when their world dies, and this chapter is much the same. Fear, despair, anger, defiance, hope for vindication in the future.

[2] I do wish I’d given myself more space to make stuff happen with regards to Britain and France’s involvement in the rebellion and the tug of war between their governments and their publics on whether or not to intervene. But that’s just a microcosm of the general problem that I’ve been trying to cram too many ideas into too little space lately. In the future I’m going to try and be more careful with how many subplots I include and how much space they’ll need.

[3] Bem and his rockets participated in OTL’s November Uprising as well.

[4] For comparison, Warsaw had 140,000 residents in 1830 IOTL. Granted, that number is inflated by all the refugees at this point, but still, that’s a percentage of the population you need to take seriously.

[5] Considering Krasiński had initially supplied the Towiańskiites just to cause more problems for Prądzyński, this qualifies as a serious “you played yourself” moment.

[6] And sure enough, the Russians do end up returning John to Saxony after about a year under house arrest in Belweder.

[7] Strange as it sounds, this also happened IOTL at the end of the November Uprising. Literally one soldier is recorded as having surrendered to the Russians afterwards. Everyone else escaped into Prussia and surrendered to them instead.

[8] I kind of regret killing off Gregor MacGregor so quickly, and won’t repeat the same mistake by getting rid of Towiański too fast. Crazy is a gift that keeps on giving, but I feel like most timelines only care about crazy when it takes over a country.

 

[Kurd Gossemer]

Glad seeing this back!

 

[TRH]

And we're back. I'm sure by now my apologies for slow updates have themselves become quite tedious, so I'll keep quiet about that from here on out. It is what it is, and hopefully I'll be able to get these out a bit faster now that I'm committing to writing just 100 words a day, a modest enough goal I should actually be able to stick to it. In any case, this is the first chapter I wrote entirely after my dive into writing Death Note fanfic, so it features a lesson I learned writing in a more novelistic style - namely, to stop stretching all my sentences and paragraphs as long as I can. There's a lot more variation between long and short sentences now, which should make it more readable overall.

I've also sketched an outline for the 1840s so it won't take another half a decade to complete. Even though it's a bit painful, I'm sticking to ten chapters and ten only before we reach some more exciting developments in the 1850s and the metaplot can shift into high gear. This next chapter covers French economic development under Napoleon II, and some of the challenges faced by him as he attempts to chart a state capitalist path without letting Paris and the areas north of it to hog all the growth to themselves. Next chapter will cover the US under Rufus Choate. In the meantime, enjoy!

Chapter Fifty-Seven: One Step at a Time

Excerpted from The Road to War: 1830-1852 by Alexander Peterson, 1971.​

Napoleon II was known for his reclusiveness and his secrets, but his vision for France’s development was clear and well-understood. The emperor’s foreign policy stressed cooperation between Britain and France to forestall renewed conflict in Europe. Napoleon II considered this advantageous because he expected France’s industrial development to overtake Britain’s given time. To further this development, he pursued a policy of state-sponsored Ricardianism similar to that of the United States, but more aggressive due to the lack of constraints on central authority in the French Empire.

Like many policy shifts under the Empire, the transition towards organised Ricardianism was gradual and driven as much by expedience and experimentation as by the ideology of French leadership. Economic historians divide the time between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of the Five Cousins into two periods. The first of these periods stretched from 1814 to 1839, and saw more limited governmental involvement in the economy compared to later developments. The goal of improving the French economy and promoting industry was there, but the Empire’s leaders took a laissez-faire approach to the issue.

Rather than involving themselves directly in the management of firms or industries, Napoleon I and his ministers aimed to create ideal conditions for business to thrive. This involved establishing protective tariffs on manufactured goods while allowing free trade for agricultural goods.

As is often the case with Napoleon I, this arrangement was a combination of long-term planning and short-term improvisation. The Year Without a Summer led to global food shortages in the years following the war. In this climate, raising food prices even further with protective tariffs would have been immensely unpopular. But even after that crisis subsided, Interior Minister Buegnot persuaded the emperor to keep food tariffs low to encourage consolidation and greater efficiency in the French agricultural sector. This in turn, Beugnot argued, would spur migration of small farmers to cities and create a pool of cheap labour necessary for factories to take root.

For a time, the laissez-faire approach seemed to be working. The French economy grew at a respectable pace in the second half of the 1810s and into the 1820s, vindicating Beugnot’s policies. But this growth was deceptive. The Napoleonic Wars had devastated the French economy, hitting especially hard in regions besides the north of the country. The resumption of global trade and the recovery of farming after 1816 made rebound growth inevitable. When Marseille saw a 75% decline in industrial production between 1789 and 1814, there were few directions to go besides up.

The modest beginnings of the French manufacturing sector coincided with this recovery, causing Beugnot and his emperor to erroneously conflate the two.

Another reason for misplaced optimism in Beugnot’s policies was the Empire’s focus on Paris and the area surrounding it. Besides England itself, the two earliest epicentres of industrialisation were the northeastern United States and the northeastern parts of France.

The southern Netherlands in particular benefited from its rich coal and iron deposits, as well as the prescient recognition of the region’s strategic importance by Napoleon I, who financed the enlargement of the port of Antwerp in the early 1810s. Napoleon II expanded on this work by opening a rail line between Antwerp and the industrial centre of Mons via Brussels in 1831, one of the young emperor’s earliest projects. [1]

Paris itself lacked the same wealth of raw materials present in the Jemappes and Nord departments. Nevertheless, the city’s size and stature as the imperial capital provided their own economic advantages. Paris' large population and the ready availability of investment capital made it an attractive place for entrepreneurs looking to start their own businesses, the most famous example being the Appert canning empire. Paris would also quickly become the Empire’s primary rail hub, starting with a connection from the capital to the city of Rouen completed in 1836.

But these success stories were the outliers. Of course industrialisation could take place in regions with the natural resources needed to support it. Or in and around the imperial capital, where the official economic policy of laissez-faire was a fiction. But elsewhere we see stagnation or even regression compared to the pre-revolutionary period. France’s Atlantic ports and their hinterlands suffered greatly from the wartime loss of trade with the West Indies, crippling local shipbuilding, sugar refining and textile industries at a stroke.

The rebuilding of the French navy in the 1810s and 1820s went some ways toward revitalising the shipbuilding industry in places like Nantes and Bordeaux, but that was a meagre consolation in the grand scheme of things. Napoleon I’s commitment to ending the slave trade following the Treaty of Madrid made a return to normalcy impossible. That Nantes defied the emperor and continued participating in the slave trade speaks to the city’s desperation.

That Nantes’ illicit slave trading wasn’t quashed until 1828 speaks to how little thought they warranted in Paris. [2]

The distinctly martial character of the Empire was another source of disparity in economic development, especially for transportation. The national road system was a product of the Napoleonic Wars. It catered first and foremost to military priorities, especially linking Paris with the frontiers. Travel and commerce were otherwise arduous. Riverine navigation left much to be desired, hampered as it was by flooding and irregular water levels. Bridges were rare, secondary roads were poor and land transport costly due to the fodder required.

Napoleon II wasn’t immediately aware of these problems upon his accession in 1830. As taken as the young man was with matters of economics and trade, he was still ensconced in Fontainebleau, whose inhabitants remained oblivious to the troubles in the country’s south and west. This ignorance reigned unchallenged until the onset of Napier’s War.

The emperor was thought to be of two minds on China. On the one hand, the restrictions of the Canton System offended his Ricardian sensibilities. In his letters to Louis II of Holland, he admitted he “would not be offended” by the prospect of Britain throwing open the gates to China by force. But Napoleon II also understood the war’s potential for economic damage. He therefore commissioned a wide-ranging study of the economic health of the French Empire. Interior Ministry personnel were dispatched across France to meet with departmental officials and investigate the health of various industries as well as the internal and external trade being conducted.

Officially, the purpose of the study was to ascertain how the French economy would be affected by an Anglo-Chinese war. But Napoleon II decided that the occasion also offered an opportunity to conduct a broader survey of his Empire and its well-being. The finalised version of An Investigation into the Prosperity and Commerce of France wouldn’t reach the emperor until June 1839. The study itself is an uneven, even schizophrenic read. As the product of dozens of economists, bureaucrats and government officials, the quality of the reporting varies wildly from one department to the next, as does the presence of statistical data. Many prefects were also reluctant to admit economic problems to their emperor for fear of being deemed incompetent.

But some truths cut through the obfuscation regardless. The city with the most to lose from Napier’s War was Marseille, which had revitalised itself in the 1830s by entering the opium trade, selling Turkish opium in Canton alongside British and American competitors. The opium trade was also beneficial for the country as a whole as a means to redress the outflow of silver in exchange for popular Chinese imports.

Of course, the Qing embargo on Western commerce in response to Napier’s aggression brought all of these dynamics to a halt. This was fortuitous where Napoleon II was concerned, as the interruption of trade gave him breathing room to consider a response. It was clear to the emperor - and anyone else with access to British newspapers - that Britain’s political will for war with China was nonexistent.

And the reports he’d received from Marseille also pointed out that the city’s opium business had fallen on hard times even before the war broke out. Between the saturation of the Chinese opium market from competing suppliers and the highly effective crackdown on the narcotic by Deng Tingzhen, the profit margins for opium traders were dwindling. Even an interruption of 12 to 18 months could be fatal to traders in such a precarious position. It was clear to the emperor that the French opium industry’s days were numbered.

But at the same time, Napoleon II had to consider his empire’s fiscal position. For him, the popularity of Chinese goods posed an even greater challenge than it did to the British. Because France had adopted a bimetallic monetary system under Napoleon I, outflows of silver to Canton posed a direct threat to the Empire’s fiscal stability. The young emperor also understood that French prosperity must be spread more broadly than it had been under his father, and so needed a solution to the troubles facing Marseille should the opium trade fail.

His solution to these problems was twofold. The first and most painful part was a reduction in Chinese imports. Import quotas were imposed upon goods such as silk and porcelain starting in 1840 to arrest the loss of silver. The second and more harmful part of France’s response was the search for substitute goods. This motivated the French war with Dainam in 1841 that resulted in a coercive tea importation deal. It also inspired Louis II to introduce his infamous Cultivation System in the Dutch East Indies, which led to several wars with and famines among the native populations of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi.

Despite their brutality, these responses had the desired effect of stabilising the French monetary system, while the influx of tea from Southeast Asia mitigated some of the pain that would have otherwise befallen French consumers. The establishment of the Dainam trade also went some way to shoring up Marseille’s economy. But gunboat diplomacy was not a new addition to the French arsenal. And it wouldn’t solve the thornier challenges facing western France and the country’s uneven internal transportation system.

To modernise French internal transport, the Empire needed a heavier hand and looser purse strings. Transportation policy fell under the purview of the Interior Ministry, but Beugnot refused to budge on these questions. Napoleon II dismissed the 77-year-old Interior Minister in late 1839, two years before his death.

With Beugnot gone, the emperor could begin overhauling French transportation in earnest. Adolphe Thiers was appointed to succeed Beugnot as Interior Minister, but he would not oversee the reforms. Those would be taken up by a new Ministry of Public Works, led by Baron Jean-Henri Hottinguer. Hottinguer was the heir to a venerable mercantile dynasty, and had assumed control of Banque Hottinguer & Cie from his father in 1831. His ministerial appointment typified the public-private partnerships encouraged under Napoleon II.

Baron Hottinguer's Ministry of Public Works used governmental power to champion key industries to degrees unmatched elsewhere in the world at the time.

Hottinguer also came to his new role armed with promises from his emperor of as much capital - financial and political - as he required to do his duty. A less disciplined man would have taken such a blank cheque as an invitation to approve every project that crossed his mind, much less his desk. But Hottinguer was a shrewd and experienced businessman, and understood the value of incremental improvement. Napoleon II had charged him with bringing the efficiency of modern transport to France as a whole, but the baron knew that expanding existing rail lines would be a more logical starting point for his endeavours, easing the transportation of iron and coal from regions where they were plentiful.

As Hottinguer himself put it, “Rail begets rail.”

The baron also realised that criss-crossing France with railroads was impractical, to say the least. But alternatives existed. Canals and even normal roads would also ease the challenges of transporting goods and people within France. As such, Hottinguer undertook ambitious canal and road-building projects as well, most notably linking the Rhine and the Rhône. Road and canal projects had the double benefit of placating political opposition to the Empire’s transportation plans. Steamboat and coaching firms were leery of nascent rail projects, but welcomed the prospect of expanded canal and road networks with open arms.

But despite its progress in improving transportation, France was less successful in matching its British rival in the realm of textile production. In this sector, the French suffered first and foremost from a lack of uniformity. In many cases, entrepreneurs recognised the difficulty of matching British efficiency in terms of cheap mass-produced products, and focused instead on quality handmade goods such as silk. This approach saw some success in its own right, both in Normandy, where a cottage industry of rural labourers ruled the day through the 1830s, as well as further south in Lyons, whose silk manufacturers were more open to mechanisation. [3]

Other areas of the broader textile industry were more of a mixed bag. Lace, linen and hemp fell out of favour, but cotton and wool-spinning flourished, embracing the innovations of mechanised weaving. Lille might have been haunted by the memory of the Devil of Roubaix, but the Devil’s long shadow did little to impede the expansion and consolidation of the city’s cotton plants. Between 1830 and 1839, the number of looms per mill increased by 105 percent, while the number of mills fell from 52 to 30. The predominantly Protestant business class in Alsace struggled from a lack of investment capital, but made their own improvements, establishing Mulhouse as a centre of high-quality export goods.

The weaving mills of Mulhouse owed part of their success to their ability to adapt to new ideas and machinery. In 1817, the future industrial magnate Nicolas Schlumberger famously smuggled machine tool designs from England by sewing the plans into the lining of his coat. But some Alsatian innovations were homegrown. Schlumberger’s other noted contribution to history is his company’s mutual insurance scheme. Schlumberger derived several key principles from his Puritan faith that he applied to his businesses. These included a rejection of social hierarchy, the elevation of work as the centrepiece of a person’s life and asceticism as the key to good management. These principles combined to form the basis of a rudimentary social safety net for Schlumberger’s employees. In exchange for a modest personal contribution and so long as they upheld the company’s ideals for excellence, workers could enjoy among the most robust social protections of the time.

“Our workers have a mutual insurance scheme for cases of sickness,” Schlumberger explained in an 1841 letter. “A sick person receives both free medical care and half his ordinary salary. A part of the proceedings of fines applied for breaking company rules is given by us towards this. Affiliation to this fund is compulsory. The administrators are chosen by the workers, we merely act as cashiers.” [4]

The benefits enjoyed by Schlumberger’s workers extended beyond paid sick leave. The textile magnate also provided lodgings, a school and access to staple goods via a shopping cooperative, all located within the factory perimeter.

As laudable as it was for a financier to provide such comprehensive support for employees in need during this time, Schlumberger’s letter also exposes the paternalistic side of his worldview. As he mentioned, one source of revenue for his company’s benefits was the punitive fines he imposed upon workers who violated workplace regulations. And the generosity of Schlumberger’s support for the families of his workers also offered him the opportunity to attune new generations of employees, shaping their social, intellectual and religious upbringing from an early age in one of the world’s first true company towns.

This insurance scheme also presaged much darker social undercurrents running through Napoleonic France. Industrialisation’s brutality and disruption to existing social fabrics are well-known. And in the absence of governmental measures to protect the less fortunate, private organisations and actors step in to fill the void. Schlumberger was well-intentioned for the most part, but even he exploited the leverage provided by his generosity to influence his workers and their families by creating a supportive community guided by his personal ideals. Other organisations had less benign ambitions, and would in time take advantage of Ricardianism’s malcontents, gathering them under a common banner as a weapon to use against the state.

In so doing, these groups would sow the seeds of the Second Terror.

[1] IOTL there were discussions about a customs union between France and Belgium in the 1830s and 1840s that were foiled by opposition from French business interests. That's not a concern ITTL, so access to Belgian coal and iron makes development all the easier in the northern departments especially.

[2] Nantes kept up an illicit slave trading industry through the 1820s IOTL as well.

[3] Basing a lot of this off of a book on 19th century France by Roger Magraw, which argues that Orléanist France's industrial development and innovation are actually underrated, including its ability to compete in the textile industry by occupying niches not met by the mass-produced British products of the time. And arguing once again that cottage industries were more competitive with early machinery than they get credit for.

[4] Found the quoted letter in a profile of the Schlumberger family by Musée Protestant, although my read on Nicolas' efforts is a bit more cynical than theirs.

 

[Kurd Gossemer]

Very happy seeing this back, hopefully France can soon take on British industry and surpass it, same with hoping them will continue to improve roads and rails in the country in order to better connect it.

 

[Wendell]

What does the internal migration situation look like here? Will French speakers of rural backgrounds in search of jobs gradually make German-speaking areas more French, for example?

 

[TRH]

Very happy seeing this back, hopefully France can soon take on British industry and surpass it, same with hoping them will continue to improve roads and rails in the country in order to better connect it.

I'll want to find some books that are more specifically focused on the history and development of southern and western France when I have the opportunity. Everyone knows about the coal and iron issues France had IOTL, and I knew or at least had an inkling about how France's Atlantic ports kind of fell off in terms of importance, but the stuff I found out about the state of internal transportation painted an uglier picture than I expected. Doesn't help that we're in the time of the OTL July Monarchy now and that just seems like a less popular subject than the two Empires or the Third Republic, at least among the books I tend to come across.

What does the internal migration situation look like here? Will French speakers of rural backgrounds in search of jobs gradually make German-speaking areas more French, for example?

I've only done a little bit of reading on OTL French internal migration so far, but I did read a paper recently explaining that a lot of internal migration tended to be short-distance, with most families studied staying within 20 kilometers even after three generations. The percentage that don't could still have the potential to change things, though. I'd want to find something that talks about the intermingling of French and German-speakers that's, you know, not just about Alsace.

 

[Wendell]

I'll want to find some books that are more specifically focused on the history and development of southern and western France when I have the opportunity. Everyone knows about the coal and iron issues France had IOTL, and I knew or at least had an inkling about how France's Atlantic ports kind of fell off in terms of importance, but the stuff I found out about the state of internal transportation painted an uglier picture than I expected. Doesn't help that we're in the time of the OTL July Monarchy now and that just seems like a less popular subject than the two Empires or the Third Republic, at least among the books I tend to come across.



I've only done a little bit of reading on OTL French internal migration so far, but I did read a paper recently explaining that a lot of internal migration tended to be short-distance, with most families studied staying within 20 kilometers even after three generations. The percentage that don't could still have the potential to change things, though. I'd want to find something that talks about the intermingling of French and German-speakers that's, you know, not just about Alsace.

What about finding a book or paper looking at language shifts in Luxembourg and Belgium?

 

[Bad@logic]

Are there any impacts to French demographic structures? I don't see any reason off-hand why they would be affected but they're the principal reason for France's economic lag in the 19th century vis-à-vis Britain. Theoretically an argument could be made for greater demand in industry providing a marginally higher birth rate due to more limited Malthusianism in the country, although the trends in place will make this rather marginal.