Things are not- yet- bad enough for Paris to rise up against the government, but the idea is a lot more plausible than it was four months ago.
Albania is an Italian protectorate under the nominal rule of Essad Pasha, backed up by an Italian corps.
REDUX: Place In The Sun: What If Italy Joined The Central Powers?
- Thread starter Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
- Start date
Well, if demonstrations start, a lot of French leadership might lose their heads.
Sort of interested in seeing how France manages to hold it togehter until 1917. They're in a bad place and one might even expect, inertia and otherwise, that they might face a heavy collapse along the line.
Then again, Falkenheyn's plans now are just purely to defend and let the enemy attrite against him, so if the French pull back to thier own defensive positions and stop attacknig, Falkenheyn' won't anyways as that goes against his plan.
Then again, Falkenheyn's plans now are just purely to defend and let the enemy attrite against him, so if the French pull back to thier own defensive positions and stop attacknig, Falkenheyn' won't anyways as that goes against his plan.
More than a few careers are about to come to a screeching halt, and more than a few people are going to be killed before this is over.
By no minor miracle, the French Government is going to quell the mutinies... for now. But it won't be enough to mount an offensive or give people confidence that the war can be won.
It kind of ashamed that the imperial Germany doesn't have the tanks or maybe manpower available to launched their own version of the Hundred days offensive.
France is breaking and I would love to be the commander of a drive towards Paris
France is breaking and I would love to be the commander of a drive towards Paris
pls don't ban me
Monthly Donor
usually in a CP victory scenario, Albania get Kiril as king ( the second son of Ferdinand of Bulgaria). Since is also in the CP in this scenario, there might be some compromise to be reached as both Italy and Bulgaria want influence over Albania
Italy has already troops there and Albania has always be one of the top priority of foreign policy for Rome, after having reach the agreement with Wien the most probable compromise that any italian government can reach with Bulgaria is: you stay out of Albania and we (mostly) stay on our side...that include the current albania
Honestly that makes sense. Albania is also the clearest gain for Italy in the entire war
My guess would be that Wilhelm will remain monarch of Albania in order for the Germans to save face (would not look all too good for a German prince to be deposed, second cousin to the Kaiser no less) but that this will be in a purely symbolic role with all the real power belonging to Essad Pasha who is backed by/completely reliant on the Italians, turning Albania into an Italian protectorate in all but name.
I would also assume that Albania after the war will annex whatever parts of Serbia and Montenegro that they want (as long as it is not taken by Bulgaria of course). The victorious Central Powers will want to punish Serbia as harshly as they can (along with punishing Montenegro by taking away its coastline which will by extension landlock Serbia), and expanding Albania will likely be a part of that since Austria-Hungary will likely not want to add that much Serbian territory to itself. It will also be a way to reward Italy since Albania will be an Italian puppet. And I doubt that the Entente will stop it. Ensuring Serbian territorial integrity is likely quite low on the list of things a defeated Entente wants to use its remaining negotiating capital for in a peace conference.
-Wilhelm is going to remain Monarch, yes, and the situation will be basically as you described. An Italian protectorate with dynastic ties to Germany.
-Albania will, however, retain its current borders: Austria-Hungary is going to annex the Montenegrin coast and that will keep Serbia landlocked. You're right that no one in the Entente is in a position to stick their necks out for Serbia.
Sure, but that's about their opinion of theirown government. Hardly the same topic as their opinion about the British.
That said I agree having foreigners come to police the mutineers would look terrible for the French government.
Hi all,
This TL is not, in fact, dead- January proved a busy start to the year and that laid my writing plans to waste. I have an end date- both in the story and the real world- planned: with the Plebiscites on the Austro-Italian border, fulfilling the promise which made the PoD possible, and some time in July when I go off to school, if not before. What I start, I finish, even if I haven't been able to find The Muse™ as of late.
The good @KingSweden24 has nominated this TL for the 2024 Best Early 20th Century Timeline Award, and while that's very generous, I don't think this TL really deserves the accolade. For one thing, writing has been glacial these past two months, and for another, there are genuinely better works in the same lane. I thus withdraw this TL from consideration, and endorse 8mm to the Left: If Hitler Died in 1923, by @KaiserKatze, a fascinating look at how Germany would develop absent history's worst villain. It's genuinely a lot of fun to read- the narrative passages in particular are excellent.
Part IV continues soon!
This TL is not, in fact, dead- January proved a busy start to the year and that laid my writing plans to waste. I have an end date- both in the story and the real world- planned: with the Plebiscites on the Austro-Italian border, fulfilling the promise which made the PoD possible, and some time in July when I go off to school, if not before. What I start, I finish, even if I haven't been able to find The Muse™ as of late.
The good @KingSweden24 has nominated this TL for the 2024 Best Early 20th Century Timeline Award, and while that's very generous, I don't think this TL really deserves the accolade. For one thing, writing has been glacial these past two months, and for another, there are genuinely better works in the same lane. I thus withdraw this TL from consideration, and endorse 8mm to the Left: If Hitler Died in 1923, by @KaiserKatze, a fascinating look at how Germany would develop absent history's worst villain. It's genuinely a lot of fun to read- the narrative passages in particular are excellent.
Part IV continues soon!
That's incredibly kind of you, even if I think that your work is the superior one. You have a very unique and enjoyable style--don't sell yourself short! Regardless, I respect your decision and am looking forward to more of your work!
Chapter XXXII- The Nanterre Massacre
Chapter XXXII
The Nanterre Massacre
La Section Francaise de l'Internationale Ouvriere- the French Section of the Worker's International- had been founded in 1905 as a merger of various far-left parties. Its varied origins left different men jostling for the top position, and schism had hung over its head before the war. One of its top men, Jean Jaures, had been assassinated the day France declared war on Germany, while another had died eighteen months later. This left only one man left standing: Jules Guesde, a one-time Marxist who led the General Strike of 1916. Many within the SFIO looked up to Guesde, but he was nowhere near as radical as supporters or detractors made out, having fallen out with Marx in the last years of his life, and represented the SFIO in the unity government which had led France since August 1914. This decision had cost him much support, as popular Socialist wisdom at the time held that a war would only serve the capitalist class and set the proletarian cause back. The only way to avoid such a disaster, everyone had claimed, was if workingmen across Europe, with class solidarity as their creed, refused to fight one another. Guesde had taken Marx's position- echoed by Vladimir Lenin in his unpublished Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism- that a war between the Great Powers would weaken their governments to such an extent that the working classes could topple them. Entering la Union Sacree thus brought the French Republic one step closer to collapse- and would give the SFIO a man close to the centre of power when collapse inevitably came.
Two years later, Guesde saw his moment coming nearer. A Minister without Portfolio didn't hear every word from the front as it came in- he did not even attend Aristide Briand's cabinet meetings- but a clever man in the right position could find things out which wouldn't make the front page of Le Temps. A civilian who worked on the national censorship board happened to be an old friend of Guesde's and, unbeknownst to his boss, a committed Socialist voter. Hundreds of news items and documents crossed this man's desk daily, and some of what he read ended up in Guesde's ear. As the Battle of Verdun dragged on, Guesde knew far more than he should have about how Falkenhayn was punishing his country, and how a junior officer named Lucien Chanaris had betrayed his country. Arrests for defeatism at home and court-martials for insubordination in the field were rising, while casualties were fast approaching the one-million mark. The censor explained that the masses knew nothing of this, as Briand knew that telling them would condemn his government to death.
Guesde believed every word. It seemed that the higher a man's rank, the worse his spirits. Unless they had lost a loved one, the proletarians went about their lives almost untroubled by the war. Even the grieving ones were able to bond with any number of others going through the same thing and work on building a new future- after all, they no longer had anything left to lose. Yet no one in Parliament seemed happy. Staffers and aides were forever grim, dreading the response as they brought another important man more news he didn't want to hear. Delegates and junior ministers bemoaned how their districts were suffering from a lack of young men, from war taxes, and in some cases, from the bloody trenches cutting through their lands. The officers who darted in and out looked like doctors watching a patient die under their care, while no one had seen Roques or Joffre in weeks. All this confirmed what Gusede had long believed: this was a bourgeois war effort dying from a lack of popular support, and the time to act was now.
Guesde first had to overcome considerable opposition from within his own party. He did not wield absolute control over the SFIO in the same way that Vladimir Lenin did over the Russian Bolsheviks, nor was the SFIO's program as fundamentally radical. Guesde, in Lenin's words, "had only one foot in the door of Marxism", and many in his own party still saw him as too radical. Had he not joined la Union sacree at the start of the war, many within the SFIO would have left to found their own pro-war socialist party. People belonged to the SFIO, not because they followed Guesde, but because they believed in socialism. Convincing them that the war had served its purpose and the best way to bring about the Revolution was to end it was a tall order.
He now turned to three men who could help rouse the masses: Alphonse Merrheim, general-secretary of France's largest trade union network la Confederation general de travail, Fernand Loriot, a schoolteacher turned union activist and critic of the Union sacree, and Raymond Pericat, leader of the International Action Committee, an anti-war syndicalist group. Between them, these three men controlled the left wing of France's trade union system. All had attended a conference at Zimmerwald in Switzerland the previous December, where they had met Lenin and agreed on the necessity of stopping the war via revolution, but had not taken meaningful action, in part out of fear that the French people were not ready for their message. What these men lacked, however, was a connection to the higher ranks of French politics- unlike Guesde, they could not smell blood in the water. When he approached them at the end of July and explained what he knew about the war's progress, all agreed that this was their best chance. Together, the SFIO, GCT, and the man in the street could bring this war to a halt.
Crucially, Guesde decided not to resign his position as Minister without Portfolio- not due to some craving for power or a desire to betray his fellow plotters, but to be in a position to challenge Briand with a motion of no confidence when it became clear that his government could not halt the mutinies in the field or the strikes in the streets. Furthermore, he could publicly declare support for the unions and give them a semi-official voice in government, which would quell moderate fears that enemies of the State led the movement. Deceiving such people was necessary until Briand's government and the war effort collapsed- it was, in the words of an American socialist, better to be a traitor to one's country than one's class. (1) As the crisis at the front deepened, the men spent July writing an open letter to the masses which would explain how badly the war was going, and how they could help turn it off and bring their loved ones back home.
With the manuscript finished at the end of June, Guesde and his allies sent advance copies of Reflections on the Government's War to political sympathisers across the country who owned printing presses. Some ran small left-wing newspapers, others published union periodicals, and some simply owned print-shops. Had they been caught, all of these men would have faced years in prison for producing subversive literature. Guesde did not put his name on the manuscript, but the others did. This exposed them to arrest, which would have killed the strike before it could begin. Fortunately, no one was caught and Reflections on the Government's War was on the streets by the end of July.
The results were explosive. Very little of this was new information- by this point, no amount of state censorship could hide the grim news coming from the Western Front- but it laid out what everyone knew in a clear-cut way, told people exactly what was at risk if they let the war drag on, and most important, it told people how they could end it. Anger and fear had eaten at the French people for two years. The Government had tried to wield those emotions against Germany, but now Guesde turned them on the men who had taken France into this war- and unlike les Boches, they were within striking distance of the man in the street.
At this point, public anger was not directed at the system as a whole, but only at those people whom the man in the street could identify as having misled them about the course of the war. The soldiers and officers in town were not the enemy- if all of this was true, then they were being lied to just as badly as the people! Nor were the various civilian officials who ran the postal service, the railways, etc. Local representatives in Parliament fell into the same category. Those men represented the Government and were not yet ready to join the growing strike, but they had done their jobs for decades and had nothing to do with the war. Many of the officials whom the people blamed were in Paris- rationing boards, newspaper and censorship officials, and of course, the Government itself. France was a highly centralised country and these bureaucrats held a great deal of power even in peacetime. This system rested on an implicit bargain: if the man in the street was to cede various aspects of his life and most of his local autonomy, the men in Paris had to run the country more efficiently, and provide him with a higher standard of living, than a less intrusive government would have been able to. Wartime pressure was crushing this system, but the bureaucrats were tightening, not loosening, their grip.
The French people were no strangers to authoritarianism, but neither were they known for tolerating a government which they felt to be cheating them. If Briand was more committed to his losing war than to looking after their well-being, they would just have to do what their grandfathers had forty.-five years ago. They'd smashed Napoleon III's twenty-year-old regime after defeats only a fraction as bad as this: how hard could it be to do the same to Aristide Briand? Protests began in the first week of August 1916, calling for an end to censorship and the "pointless wasting" of lives. These were initially limited to the main urban centres, but spread to smaller provincial towns within a few days, and while they did not call for an end to the war, Briand's Government assumed German infiltrators were backing them. His response, then, was analogous to how Nivelle had treated the first mutineers at L'empire-aux-Bois: a show of force that cost him whatever support he had enjoyed amongst the undecided, and ultimately brought him down.
Over a thousand people gathered in Nanterre on the morning of August 10th. It was a wealthy business district and many important companies had their headquarters there: the protestors hoped to give "the investors and capitalists" a display of anger which not even they could ignore. Local SFIO officials had organised the march, but most of the turnout was spontaneous: an odd mixture of women and teenagers who would be conscripted upon leaving the lycee, along with a handful of people who worked in reserved occupations. The protesters came with peaceful intent, but many took clubs or knives with them just in case. Briand later pointed to this as "proof" that they were instigating a riot, but left out the key detail that his men fired first.
At 10:30 AM, after half an hour of demonstrations, one hundred Paris policemen arrived and demanded that the crowd disperse. One man shouted back that protesting was perfectly legal and that Paris was not under martial law, to which a police captain replied that Paris was only free because of the men at the front, and that in protesting the war, "your sort" were stabbing "the real men" in the back. One hundred policemen with billy-clubs might have looked intimidating to women and teenagers, but anyone who had been in the Army- or enough street brawls- could figure out that the crowd had the upper hand. The police had no way of identifying the ringleaders and arresting people at random for the crime of peaceful protest, besides being illegal, would have touched off a riot. So the protestors hollered their slogans and hoisted their signs, but stayed put. This left the police without a good option- either advance and fight a street battle in the heart of Paris, or pull back and look overbearing- and so they chose to stay where they were. Both shouted at each other across a hundred metres of cobblestone street, each hoping the other would go home.
Only the oldest present remembered the Paris Commune of forty-five years prior; certainly, everyone was too young to have fought in it. The barricades of 1848, 1832, and 1830 belonged to the history books and, at most, childhood anecdotes from one's grand-pere. There were plenty of brawlers and ruffians on both sides, but no one had any experience with no-holds-barred street fighting- making the situation all the more dangerous. A veteran of 1871 or 1848 would have known that there was a world of difference between two groups shouting at one another, and those same men preparing to fight to the death. Neither side had an objective to take, and just as important, neither had come with the intent to kill. On a mundane level, that meant neither side had brought firearms aside from a few .22-millimetre pistols- certainly not enough for a pitched gun battle- but the psychological piece was every bit as important. Just as the mutineers hadn't wanted to fight their comrades-in-arms, no one here wanted to kill their fellow Frenchmen unless it was necessary to save their own lives. Both sides had come to do a job, and everyone hoped to go home.
Unfortunately, both sides assumed the worst of the other. The police saw a crowd ten times their size and feared they would charge at any moment. If they did, the police were far better trained and all carried clubs and sticks, but no matter how many protesters they took with them, they would break without reinforcements. The protestors saw a wall of uniformed men, almost certainly carrying guns and with reinforcements on the way. Such assumptions convinced both sides, without a shred of evidence, that they had nothing to lose- and which, coupled with a lack of understanding about large-scale street fighting, was about to prove deadly.
Shortly before eleven AM, the police captain sent a runner back to headquarters with a message for the Mayor's office: the protestors had refused all orders to disperse and the standoff showed no sign of ending. He needed armed reinforcements, both to demonstrate his resolve, and in case they decided to charge his lines. Meanwhile, the police captain decided to retreat east towards the city centre: the further away from the low-class residential neighbourhoods, the less familiar the protestors would be with the territory and the fewer people likely to join their ranks. As the runner sped back, the police force began marching through La Defence towards the River Seine. Sensing victory, the protestors followed them, shouting ever more inflammatory things. Not all of the police understood why they were retreating and assumed that the other side was about to charge them. By this point, the police had retreated to the Pont de Neully, a bridge over the River Seine, and some of the protestors had followed them. Everyone was crammed into a tight space, and no one could do anything but retreat or wade into a fight. Many of the police longed for guns, confident that even a few warning shots would be enough to break this rabble up. One of the protestors hurled a chunk of masonry, and his friends began doing likewise. Within moments, a brick caught a policeman in the temple. He went down and did not rise again- and that was all the provocation needed.
Swinging clubs and batons, the police charged, and the crowd broke. Women fled in terror while teenagers and brawlers waded into the fight. They were many, and the police were few. This was going to be easy. Both sides hammered the other but even in the heat of the moment, had the good sense not to take their pistols out. The more level-headed expected everyone to tire of fighting after a few minutes and go home- there would be arrests and nasty wounds, but most likely no deaths. This was a larger fight than anyone had ever been in, but the usual rules still applied.
So they would have, but for the runner the police captain had sent back. He had spoken of a crowd refusing to disperse and preparing for a fight; the Mayor's office had talked to the Chief of Police and agreed to send another hundred men- this time, carrying guns. Reinforcements went out on horseback at a quarter past eleven, aiming to hit Nanterre from the south. When they got there, they found the area a little torn up but empty, and the locals had to explain where the protestors had advanced to. The reinforcements galloped off- and found their comrades fighting for their lives against a mob ten times their size. Thank le bon Dieu they had not wasted a moment getting here- any later and this rabble would have finished their illegal uprising!
The cavalry charged. Heavy pistols fired into the women fleeing the battle. Trapped, with nowhere to run, the terrified women were massacred by fire from men they could not even see and within fifteen seconds everyone was dead. The cavalry galloped over the innocent corpses and began firing indiscriminately into the brawlers. Trapped on the bridge with an enemy seemingly willing to kill them all and with nowhere to run, panic took hold. Dozens were killed and over a hundred wounded before some of the protestors were able to break through to the east bank of the Seine.
Word soon spread that not only was the French Army killing its men who refused to advance, but the civilian police were now massacring protestors. When dawn came on August 11th, it brought one simple question: who in their right mind would want to fight for Aristide Briand?
(1) I've seen this quote attributed to both Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Flynn.
I'll do a general wrap-up after the Peace Treaties and foreshadow the outcome of the Russian Civil War, the survival of Austria-Hungary, and the likelihood of any potential Round II. Should take us through to 1918-1919, although in less detail.
Its been a great read. The French stab in the back impression is palpable