Napoleon III gets everything he wants

Reading up on the Second Mexican Empire and Emperor Maximilian of Mexico was the first thing to get me interested in the idea of Alternate History. It seemed to me like Max was a good leader and a good guy who got shafted by history, and I wondered what other possibilities were for him not to get screwed over quite so badly. Anything from exiled to establishing a stable Empire.
 
Reading up on the Second Mexican Empire and Emperor Maximilian of Mexico was the first thing to get me interested in the idea of Alternate History. It seemed to me like Max was a good leader and a good guy who got shafted by history, and I wondered what other possibilities were for him not to get screwed over quite so badly. Anything from exiled to establishing a stable Empire.

Actually the one thing I'd really love explored more outside of the wonderful but cancelled "The Smallest Possible Difference", which is Emperor Maximillian of Austria, I feel like the guys unique blend of monarchism and liberal rule would probably have gone over better in his home country rather than in Mexico itself.
 
That stems from most of the Latin American republics collapsing in on themselves in a near never ending cycle of civil warfare and independence movements. Where did that not exist? Brazil and that monarchy had two monarchs, the second of which made the country a great power. Max was rather liberal, offered Juarez the keys to his kingdom, and developed a genuine love for the country he adopted for his own. Its easy to see that point get more developed when one looks at what happened after Brazil's empire and Mexico. It got worse before it got better, in some places much worse.

AH.com loves the (second version of the) Hapsburgs, AH.com loves liberals, and AH.com loves the civil war (for its vast wealth of timeline material). So AH.com will have a very endearing fondness for Maximilian Hapsburg.

Except really I feel like that's attributing Brazils success to the wrong thing in this scenario. The thing about Brazil was not that it was a monarchy, it was that it managed to gain independence relatively bloodlessly with an extremely built up national infrastructure vis a vis latin american republics and had it's fair share of good luck (Pedro II was an exceptional emperor). That luck ran out under the Republic but not because the monarchy was gone, it was because the people replacing the monarchy where a bunch of jumped up aristocrats who ran a kleptocracy based only around their interests and allowed the national infrastructure and relatively stable transition from Colony to independent state and pissed away the history of stable government that had previously made Brazil so attractive to outside investors and immigrants.
 

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Except really I feel like that's attributing Brazils success to the wrong thing in this scenario. The thing about Brazil was not that it was a monarchy, it was that it managed to gain independence relatively bloodlessly with an extremely built up national infrastructure vis a vis latin american republics and had it's fair share of good luck (Pedro II was an exceptional emperor). That luck ran out under the Republic but not because the monarchy was gone, it was because the people replacing the monarchy where a bunch of jumped up aristocrats who ran a kleptocracy based only around their interests and allowed the national infrastructure and relatively stable transition from Colony to independent state and pissed away the history of stable government that had previously made Brazil so attractive to outside investors and immigrants.
Brazil got its independence relatively bloodlessly because it was a monarchy and Dom Pedro I, had it even attempted to gain independence as a republic it would have been more destroyed than many other places in Latin America in large part because the nobility there had an enormously powerful presence and royalists were everywhere after the royal family stayed there during Napoleon. Given the nature of some of Dom Pedro I's generals and backers in Brazil, if there wasn't a monarch to center around it could well have fell into the same situation that every other provincial government did inside of Latin America. To not attribute this to the monarchy would be to not attribute Thomas Jefferson becoming president to democracy.

That's not to say stability and good government stems from Kings, Kingdoms have their own problems with stability and good government. Yet, in the case of Latin America, it was at its strongest and most internationally important when it was a monarchy and was at its weakest and the play thing of other powers when it was not. That's a simple, sad, truth. Competent leaders at the helm of stable republics inside of Latin America could have made half a dozen countries strong rival competitors to the United States. It was just that the very nature of those republics that ruined that from happening. All you need to do is create a POD far enough back to alter the state of the conflict between the two different forms of revolutionary groups inside of Latin America to make this happen.
 
the curious thing is France wanks are always based either on Seven years or on the first Napoleon

There is a very good reason for it.

The 7 years war was one of the most important moments in world history since it defined which european country would be the most dominant in shaping the whole world.

If you look at the world map before this war, the french empire was one of the most important in the world and was building dominating positions in the most strategic areas of the world : India and north America.
At the end of this world, this first french empire was wiped out.

Napoleon was France's last bid to turn the tide of events and rebuild a new kind of french supremacy that could overcome Britain's growing world empire. It failed not because it was hopeless but because of Napoleon's faults and mistakes at the moment he was precisely succeeding (the years 1808-1812).

When the british took care to deprive France of Rhineland and what was going to become Belgium, it un onciously forever destroyed the possibility for France being again a rival for world domination since it deprived France of one of the key european areas for any future industrial superpower.
So, from 1815 on, one of the main objectives of french diplomacy was : never again a conflict against the UK. From 1815 on, France always yielded to british demands.

This is not that France did not have many great scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. It did have many. But it decisively lacked coal and iron, so the french industrial production was much smaller than the british and german ones.

By the same way, Britain did the catastrophic mistake to give Rhineland to Prussia. Which enabled Germany to concentrate 2 supercenters for industrial power : Rhineland-Ruhr + Silesia-Saxony.
 
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