Sword and Spirit: A Paille-au-Nez World

[Goweegie2]

Welcome guys, gals, and nonbinary pals to the official thread for my new TL, Sword and Spirit!

I've been posting teasers for a bit so I figure it's probably time I made an official thread. I'm also crossposting this to Sufficient Velocity and Sea Lion Press, so if any of you use those sites you can alternatively check out my TL's threads on those sites.

The point of divergence for Sword and Spirit is that a small band of Barbary pirates attacked Ajaccio, Corsica on 3 November 1813, during the War of the Sixth Coalition. French intelligence initially mistakes it for a British raid, which makes Napoléon believe that the coalition had him surrounded on all sides.

Around the same time, Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich proposed a memorandum to Napoléon. This memorandum would allow Napoléon to remain Emperor of the French, however France would be reduced to what the revolutionaries considered to be France's "natural borders". This meant France would retain control of Belgium, Savoy, Nice, and the Rhineland (up to the eastern bank of the Rhine), but would lose all their further conquests and client states.

In our timeline Napoléon rejected Metternich's memorandum as he expected to win the war. However, with the added feeling of panic and damaged pride caused by the raid on his hometown, Napoléon accepted the proposals, saving himself from his fate on Elba and St. Helena.

Sword and Spirit will be mostly a "Type II" on TV Tropes' Sliding Scale of AH Plausibility, being a largely plausible TL with a good amount of creative license taken. However, it will also incorporate many "Type III" elements, such as retaining OTL figures in most countries despite the divergences. This makes it similar to Hail, Britannia and Our Fair Country in this regard. However, one difference from those TLs will be that royal dynasties will be completely altered.

Much like my previous TLs, Sword and Spirit will be largely a graphic TL, consisting primarily of wikiboxes, maps, sometimes news articles, and the like. However unlike my previous TLs I will be making (or at least attempting to make) much larger writeups for my maps and wikiboxes. They will still be done in a largely Wikipedia-esque style though, and will be formatted largely through graphics, which is why I am still placing this in the Maps and Graphics forum.

Much like HB and OFC, anyone is free to contribute to Sword and Spirit. However, I will also lay down some ground rules for contributing, much like Leinad did for HB and Kanan did for OFC. The rules are:

1. I will maintain full final creative control over Sword and Spirit, and as such it is not a shared world. I welcome contributions, but I will retain full veto power over any and all contributions.
2. Don't post any contributions without running your ideas by me first. I accept conversations, but I am much more active on Discord, particularly in the Our Fair Community Discord server, where I have a project channel in which people are free to suggest ideas.
3. If I ask you to change something that you have contributed, please change it.
4. Do not post anything deliberately offensive or inflammatory.
5. Please add some kind of an informative writeup to your contributions.
6. Anything not threadmarked is non-canon. This applies to both contributions and my own posts. I reserve the right to retcon anything at any time. I will attempt to notify any contributors if their contributions are removed from canon, however I may forget.
7. Any contributions posted on one of the three sites I am hosting this TL on I will crosspost to the other two and credit the original contributor.

I also invite you all to ask any questions either in this thread, on the SV or SLP threads, or over on Discord, and I will try my best to answer them all.

I also feel I should give a special thanks to the amazing people over at the Our Fair Community Discord server for helping me develop this TL!

 

[Goweegie2]

First up, here's the current canon world map:

 

[Goweegie2]

Napoléon I (born Napoleone di Buonaparte) was the first Emperor of the French from 18 May 1804 until his death in 1837. Rising to prominence during the French Revolution, he led several initially successful military campaigns throughout the early 19th century. Napoléon dominated European and global affairs for around a decade while leading France against a series of coalitions in the Great European Wars. He won most of these wars and the vast majority of his battles, expanding the French Empire across most of continental Europe before being reduced to its "natural borders" with the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1813. He is considered one of the greatest commanders in history, and his wars and campaigns are studied at military schools worldwide. Napoléon's political and cultural legacy has endured as one of the most celebrated and controversial leaders in human history.

He was born in Corsica to a relatively modest Italian family from minor nobility. He was serving as an artillery officer in the French army when the French Revolution erupted in 1789. He rapidly rose through the ranks of the military, seizing the new opportunities presented by the Revolution and becoming a general at age 24. He would go on to lead several successful military campaigns, establishing "sister republics" in Italy with local support, and becoming a war hero in France. In 1798 he would lead a military campaign in Egypt which he would use as a springboard to stage a coup and declare himself First Consul of France. After the Peace of Amiens in 1802, Napoléon turned his attention to France's colonies. He sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States, and he attempted to restore slavery to the French Caribbean colonies. However, while he was successful in restoring slavery in the eastern Caribbean, Napoleon failed in his attempts to subdue Saint-Domingue, and the colony that France once proudly boasted of as the "Pearl of the Antilles" became independent as Haiti in 1804. Napoléon's ambition and public approval inspired him to declare himself Emperor of the French in 1804, and proceed to begin invasions of continental Europe, carving out a sphere of influence from Iberia to Poland and even dissolving the Holy Roman Empire. However his campaigns would take a turn for the worse during his attempted invasion of Russia, and he would soon be chased back into France.

Following a Barbary pirate raid on Corsica which French intelligence initially mistook for a British attack, Napoléon would accept the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1813, reducing France to its "natural" 1801 borders. However, these borders also included numerous ethnic Dutch in Rhenania and ethnic Netherlanders in Flanders, who would stage a handful of revolts throughout the remainder of Napoléon's reign. He would however be successful in quelling said revolts, as well as settling some parts of southern Rhenania with French colonists. Napoléon would also command the French armies in the Pan-Balkan War against the Ottoman Empire, being credited by many as the driving force behind the Ottomans' loss.

Napoléon would die peacefully in his sleep in 1837, being succeeded as Emperor by his eldest son Napoléon II.