POD: 1800, France wank

With a POD around the year 1800, make France as powerful as possible, without ASB-intervention.
 
Russian campaign follows the Baltics to St Petersburg. The Russians lose as the French have better logistics, importing their food and ammo through Sweden.
 
Have Napoleon never overthrow the Spanish Bourbons; they may have been lousy allies and somewhat untrustworthy, but leaving them in place would have saved a ton of resources compared to the OTL Peninsular War.

Then, if he has to go to war with Russia, fight the war in Poland and not invade Russia itself. He can win that war. And if Russia's defeated, at some point Britain will be open to peace negotiations again.

In the long-term, there may still be the issue of France's curiously low birth rate to deal with, although all the annexed territory may make that a non-issue.
 
Most plausible: Have Bismarck fall off his horse. France remains the primary land power in Europe.
 
Most plausible: Have Bismarck fall off his horse. France remains the primary land power in Europe.

Would it not be better to have an earlier POD and let France keep territories won by Napoleon? As mentioned by others here, invading Russia was not a good idea...
 
Avoid land war in Russia by using the liberation of Poland as an excuse to take the war to polish soil. Establishing a greater Duchy of Warsaw or a regular Polish nation will serve as a buffer against Russia and Austria, and a staunch ally.

Remain allied to the Spanish rather than invading. Napoleon thought everything like a general, which makes sense given he was one, but he could not keep hold on Europe with fighting. A hegemony on the continent requires a network of alliances and truces, not a huge army - you cannot permanently defeat everyone at once, as Hitler would learn years later. Napoleon will need to come to some arrangement with the English for example.

Maybe a kind of cold war situation will arise, where the English and French are bound by treaty and balance of forces to not have a war, but will try and use proxies. Quebec separatists in Canada fueled by French arms and money, Corsican rebels supported by the Royal Navy etc. Would make for an interesting kind of Napoleonic spy thriller timeline.
 

Ramontxo

Donor
What about Napoleon falling of his horse in Elba? No one hundred days, no Waterloo, France retains the Rhine border and is far more a challenge to Bismarck's new Germany...
 
What about Napoleon falling of his horse in Elba? No one hundred days, no Waterloo, France retains the Rhine border and is far more a challenge to Bismarck's new Germany...
Elba? Elba is far too late for France to keep its Rhine border. It was quickly decided in Vienna that France would gain its pre-revolutionary borders. If you want a French Rhine border you need an earlier POD, or a later POD in which France manages to beat Prussia somehow and gains the German Rhineland.
 
Bernadotte betrays once more and his 145k men he brought at Leipzig stabs the Prussians and Russians in the back. They are routed, Napoleon can still go on and Austria might decide going with Nappy isn't so bad, especially if they can hope to recuperate Silesia.
Thus the 7th Coalition explodes and the Brits finally go bankrupt.
France ends up with at least its 1812 frontiers : Rhineland, Belgium, Netherlands, German North Sea coast, Piedmont, Lazio, and the Illyrian Provinces are French.
Definitely an ultimate Francewank.
 
France ends up with at least its 1812 frontiers : Rhineland, Belgium, Netherlands, German North Sea coast, Piedmont, Lazio, and the Illyrian Provinces are French.
Definitely an ultimate Francewank.
Personaly I believe that with so many non French areas within France, France is overextended. Many of these areas are going to revolt, especialy when a weaker ruler (instead of Napoleon) of France arises. Simply put, I think this is too much and too late. This is the age of nationalism and they do not consider themselves French. A smaller France is a more stable France. Limit France to the Rhine border and not any bigger.

Actualy, I would say that an OTL France with only Wallonia and its industrial potential would be one if not the greatest power, if you can prevent the rise of Germay. And even with a Germany, France could easily be Germanies equal if it develops Wallonia well enough.
 
I see your point : Lazio will have to be returned to the pope and the Illyrian Provinces must be given to some Venice.
However I think Belgium was pretty much French and Catalans were Francophiliac. So these areas will be easily held. What is interesting is keeping Piedmont and Liguria. France has been long looking to have these.
As for the Northern Netherlands-Hamburg, Napoleon should consider backing down in Spain, putting the Bourbons back and give them back to his brother.
 
Shortly after the defeat of the Habsburgs in Italy, and before he can give France a great naval defeat in Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte trips over a rock. France is not led by a man so insatiably ambitious that after any number of great victories in Europe (and he certainly achieved a very great many of them) he attempted to further humiliate his opponents and achieve even more, rather than stopping while he was ahead and creating a peace that France could live with. As a result, France doesn't spend the next more-than-a-decade doing its very best to antagonise and subjugate the whole of Europe.

The United Kingdom is an undefeatable opponent so long as there are still significant powers on the Continent that are willing to accept British money to fight France. This threat cannot be beaten by attempting to force everyone in Europe to treat the United Kingdom as an enemy while it is France which, in this process, is attempting to control their economic affairs; after all, even the French army marched on British-made boots. Bonaparte's approach was foolish and wrong-headed. The intelligent way to beat this threat—and it really wouldn't have been hard—would be to stop antagonising the rest of Europe, so that they don't have an incentive to attack France. After beating them in wars, don't rub their faces in the dirt, allow them to keep what they had before, so that you look like a fellow great power that can be lived with, rather than a terrible and vast danger that must be wiped out at all costs for the sake of survival as a state; don't endlessly try to get more control over them and more territory, most obviously the invasion of Spain, the invasion of Russia, the Treaty of Tilsit and the installation of the Continental System. Bonaparte was so obsessed with glory and conquest that he didn't realise it was often not the intelligent thing to do.

The results? Germany remains divided, and better yet France's conservative opponents will be the ones keeping it so, because they'll fight any revolutionary pan-German nationalist movement seeking to depose German states' monarchs). The United Kingdom remains unhappy with France but can't do anything about it and gradually just gets used to it, France's border lies on the Rhine. Italy is reasonably likely to unify and become a nationalist state in French orbit. The French leadership is now sane and pragmatic enough to avoid antagonising most of Europe. Maybe without Bonaparte's creation of a de facto autocracy there is even a functional French democracy far earlier than in OTL. No-one even thinks of invading Spain or Russia, and lots of countries aren't given incentives to modernise and a strong dose of national identity that defines itself primarily as anti-French because of Napoleonic invasions (most importantly Germany). France has a lot of territory, but a lot of time to Francify it, and isn't as horrendously over-extended as under Bonaparte in OTL. France is set to be the dominant power of Europe for the next few decades at the very least and quite possibly centuries.

France-wank, right there.

I've never understood why people revere Bonaparte except those too short-sighted to look beyond his military conquests. He took charge of a highly successful French Republic, antagonised practically everyone in Europe and thus managed to turn it into a far weaker French absolute monarchy, in the process creating a demographic disaster (France used to have a population equal to Germany's!) whose results caused defeat and woe for the French nation many times for more than a century afterwards. By any reasonable standard he was a complete failure and France would be better off if he had never taken power. Indeed, if we do a thought-experiment on what France would have been like without him, it ends up looking far more successful than OTL with him.
 

Ramontxo

Donor
Elba? Elba is far too late for France to keep its Rhine border. It was quickly decided in Vienna that France would gain its pre-revolutionary borders. If you want a French Rhine border you need an earlier POD, or a later POD in which France manages to beat Prussia somehow and gains the German Rhineland.

Well maybe not the Rhine but surely a far better position. From wikie

"The treaty reapportioned several territories amongst various countries. Most notably, France retained all of the territory which it possessed as of 1 January 1792, and also was returned many of the territories lost to Britain during the war. These included Guadeloupe, which had been ceded to Sweden by Britain when she entered the coalition. In return, Sweden was compensated 24 million francs and this money gave rise to the Guadeloupe Fund. The only exceptions to this were Tobago, St. Lucia, Seychelles and Mauritius. Great Britain kept sovereignty over the island of Malta.[7] The treaty returned to Spain the territory of San Domingo that had been transferred to France by the Treaty of Basel in 1795. This implicitly recognised French sovereignty over Saint-Domingue, which Dessalines had proclaimed independent under the name of Haiti. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Paris_(1815)
 
Well maybe not the Rhine but surely a far better position.

The difference between France's 1792 borders (established in the 1814 peace) and 1790 borders (from the 1815 peace) was minor, just a handful of towns in what is now Germany.

The bigger difference between the two treaties was that in 1815, France was now forced to pay 700 million francs in reparations to the Coalition, which would occupy the country (at France's expense) until it was paid.


I've never understood why people revere Bonaparte except those too short-sighted to look beyond his military conquests. He took charge of a highly successful French Republic, antagonised practically everyone in Europe and thus managed to turn it into a far weaker French absolute monarchy, in the process creating a demographic disaster (France used to have a population equal to Germany's!) whose results caused defeat and woe for the French nation many times for more than a century afterwards. By any reasonable standard he was a complete failure and France would be better off if he had never taken power. Indeed, if we do a thought-experiment on what France would have been like without him, it ends up looking far more successful than OTL with him.

The Republic was only successful on the battlefield, and even that was to a large degree due to Napoleon's own efforts (the War of the Second Coalition was nearly a disaster until he turned it around). It was not at all a stable government and in fact faced civil war throughout its existence. Napoleon brought stability to France and reformed its domestic institutions in many positive ways. The downside of his rule, of course, was that he was constantly at war, which finally led to his demise - but honestly, almost any non-Bourbon regime in France in 1800 would have been. The rest of Europe was loath to accept any kind of French government besides the Bourbon monarchy.
 
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Kill Napoleon. A more cautious leader will retain control over western Germany and Italy.

If the French were wise enough to pick a more cautios leader. Who is likely to be picked?

I assume a potential candidate could have been Jean Baptiste Bernadotte?
 
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No. Bernadotte was at best a bit player in the late 1790s. He did not emerge as a true force until after he was made Marshal of the Empire in 1804, gave a good account of himself at Austerlitz and only escaped the full scope of Napoléon's wrath for having missed both Iéna and Auerstedt (when he could clearly hear Davout's and Brunswick's guns) by energetically giving chase to the disintegrating Prussian army. Even so, it wasn't until the siege of Danzig that the Swedes singled him out as an interesting choice for a future king.

A better fit would be Augereau. He behaved very well as a divisional commander for Bonaparte during the first Italian campaign. He was sent by his commander to Paris to present the captured flags to the Directoire and accrued a lot of good will and glory for that. He personally helped in the anti-monarchist coup of 1797. He was also a pretty dedicated Republican and criticized Bonaparte setting himself up as Consul. And his later career as corps commander shows that he was not particularly aggressive. So, have Bonaparte be incapacitated in 1798 and Augereau might be seen as a good figurehead. France still has a lot of good generals and Augereau is probably not as self-aggrandizing as Napoléon (but then, few people are, were or will be). It might win a few wars, smack the Hapsburgs around the block a bit to teach them what's what, but there won't be so many far-flung adventures. There sure won't be any foolishness in Egypt. England will still be aggravated of course, but it won't itself in a desperate struggle for survival against an unstoppable juggernaut.
 
Bernadotte betrays once more and his 145k men he brought at Leipzig stabs the Prussians and Russians in the back. They are routed, Napoleon can still go on and Austria might decide going with Nappy isn't so bad, especially if they can hope to recuperate Silesia.
Thus the 7th Coalition explodes and the Brits finally go bankrupt.
France ends up with at least its 1812 frontiers : Rhineland, Belgium, Netherlands, German North Sea coast, Piedmont, Lazio, and the Illyrian Provinces are French.
Definitely an ultimate Francewank.

I strongly doubt Bernadotte would switch sides again at that stage (the campaign of 1813 at the time of Leipzig). Especially considering how he personnally hated Napoleon.

But let's rather consider that Napoleon succeeds in keeping Sweden at least neutral or at his side and wins a devastating victory in the summer of 1813 at Lutzen or Dresde, for example making prisoners the tsar and the king of Prussia.

Anyway Napoleon is going to need to hand back many territories to obtain a real and lastable peace :
- Illyria and everything east of the Rhine,
- probably the Netherlands otherwise Britain won't sign,
- give-up Spain except maybe Catalonia.

He can have compensations in Switzerland.
 
The Republic was only successful on the battlefield, and even that was to a large degree due to Napoleon's own efforts (the War of the Second Coalition was nearly a disaster until he turned it around). It was not at all a stable government and in fact faced civil war throughout its existence. Napoleon brought stability to France and reformed its domestic institutions in many positive ways. The downside of his rule, of course, was that he was constantly at war, which finally led to his demise - but honestly, almost any non-Bourbon regime in France in 1800 would have been. The rest of Europe was loath to accept any kind of French government besides the Bourbon monarchy.

That's quite a big "downside".

And I don't buy the argument that the rest of Europe's attitude towards Revolutionary France was purely because it was revolutionary and had nothing to do with Bonaparte's aggression. An ideologically hostile power is one thing; an ideologically hostile power that is endlessly attempting to conquer more territory from you and, after every war, humiliates you further by taking land or money and thus gives you a great incentive to fight the next war, to avenge the humiliation and get back what he took. No victory was ever enough for Bonaparte. Be a successful general? Nah, be leader of France. Be merely the recognised leader of the French Republic? Nah, be a monarch. Have Spain as an ally with a great deal of French influence? Nah, invade. Have the Have most of Europe under your thumb with the British thrown out? Nah, attempt to gain a much greater degree of control over the European powers by controlling their economic affairs—even though your own army marches on British boots. Have Russia defy you in peace even when Russia can't realistically expect to attack you? Nah, invade Russia. Et cetera ad infinitum. Nothing satisfied Bonaparte; the leaders of the rest of Europe were absolutely right to perceive that he would settle for nothing less than total domination of Europe. If not for Bonaparte, they would have grown tired of fighting France when it brought them no reward and nothing but defeat, if France seemed a dangerously powerful great power that could be coexisted with; but Bonaparte's France couldn't be coexisted with because it wasn't just dangerously powerful, it also clearly sought to dominate, rather than merely not be dominated by, other great powers. He couldn't have crippled the United Kingdom, as he ought to have understood; but he could have rendered it powerless to hurt him by taking away its 'sword', the European countries that had good reason to hate him and to accept British money to fight against him. There wasn't going to be an early-19th-century D-Day; the United Kingdom was as powerful as the number of Continental enemies Revolutionary France makes for itself.

The Republic might have achieved stability without him; but with him it was doomed to destruction, because France, even with a brilliant military leader and plenty of reforms to strengthen it, can't beat the rest of Europe united against it again and again and again. It needs to win every time; the rest of Europe united only needs to win once, and it did. (The Hundred Days never stood a chance.) Bonaparte's glory-lust caused a demographic disaster for France that gave France at least four grievous defeats—the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War and the two World Wars—for more than a hundred years to come; the unification of Germany wouldn't be so much of a threat to a France whose population was equal to Germany's. Bonaparte directly caused the destruction of the French Republic and the success of counter-revolution. Plus, he dismantled the last of French democracy in favour of his own autocracy.

I honestly can't see why anyone would revere the man. Creating the Code Napoléon and various other judicial reforms is no compensation for causing such tremendous woe for one's own country.

France would be wanked if he had never taken power. Being less amazingly militarily successful probably wouldn't have meant being instantly overrun. Without him, Revolutionary France might have survived; with him, because of his insatiable ambition, it never could.
 
Well, maybe you can't see why many people would revere the man Napoleon, but the fact nonetheless is that this man has many fans 2 centuries later.

Of course, napoleonic propaganda was very efficient post mortem. But there were other reasons too. The napoleonic wars, except in Spain, were not the bad guy against the good guys. Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia were no less imperialist than France. And the wars did not start with Napoleon. He inherited war from the previous revolutionary governments.
 
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