Elmarism seem to be getting set up as a fill in for Marxism much as Aristism will be filling for Fascism.
Yep. And speaking of Elmar…
As a young man and a historian, for as long as I can remember I looked forward to the Grand Tour I was to have taken. There were many, many places in the world I wished to see. It was a trait I shared with my father, who often took our family on excursions either to other parts of France, or abroad.
These vacations were rewarding. In Milan in ’35 we had the privilege of being among the first to hear the great American composer Joseph Green conduct his sublime Symphony No. 1, after his graduation from the Conservatory and before his return to his homeland. At the time I must confess his work seemed pleasing, yet unremarkable; I should never have guessed the sublime quality of his later works.
In the summer of ’37, my father was too ill to travel, so I accompanied the family to London. There I spoke with young men who were planning to join the new regiments in anticipation of an easy victory against Russians, Greeks, or Americans—all of whom were thought to be equally hapless as enemies. I sometimes wonder how many of those young men returned to London, and how many of them were whole in body and mind when they did.
Father took us to the Netherlands more than once. For the first visit, which as I recall was in ‘27, he took only myself and Marguerite[1], as Mother was pregnant at the time. He was careful to instruct us to speak only Dutch and use the Dutch forms of our names.
Once (this would have been in the autumn of ’30, not long after the rebellion was put down) I was called to a meeting in the headmaster’s office, where a teacher I had never met before tested my “speaking skills” by asking me to describe my summer vacation with great thoroughness. Not until much later did I realize he had been an investigator with the secret police, looking for some hint that my father might be in league with the Dutch government. Of course, he was not, and I am very glad that nothing I said in my relative innocence gave that impression.
In ’33 Father felt safe taking the whole family, and making no effort to conceal our nationality. Which seemed odd, as the Dutch government had grown more loudly hostile towards the French, not less. But the louder the palace spoke, the less the average Dutchman on the street seemed to hear. In any event, Amsterdam in ’33 was a dreary place. The Hague in ’36, which I saw traveling alone, was even more so—so much so that I spent only a week there before going on to the excitement of Hannover and Göttingen. Ah, the Zukunftsbrückenkopf! Even before the war, it was an exciting place…
But it was on our London trip that we learned—from a family taking the whole of the funeral of the Queen of the Netherlands, the disruptions that accompanied it[2], and the king’s decision to suspend the States-General and rule by decree, blaming ‘Bonapartists’ for the state of agitation in his land. After that, Mother decided there would be no more trips to the Netherlands until the situation had calmed down there.
As it happened, that was the last such trip we took together as a family—Marguerite married in the fall, and her Luc took her to the new colony outside Bône.[3] And I, of course, was long since capable of choosing my own travel destinations.
That summer my friends and I went to Anvers—where, indeed, most of the intellectual life of the Netherlands seemed to already be happening, and the old prince[4] was the toast of the town. Regarding the Netherlands, my curiosity warred with my caution as regards to what might be happening there. Édouard, that rogue, decided for all of us: “Why risk syphilis from some toothless old whore or suffer the fumbling of some Polish peasant girl? There are clean Dutch maidens in Amsterdam who will do anything for the same number of francs!” I rather doubted that women willing to “do anything” would still be maidens by the time we arrived, but now I knew that if I went to Amsterdam, I would at least not be traveling alone.
And unlike myself, Édouard knew someone trustworthy who could take us up the coast and into Haarlem—though I think that since the passing of Talleyrand, the Dutch were a little less on their guard against us. (I have heard that in his illness, the old man lamented that he was suffering “the torments of the damned”—to which an unsympathetic onlooker replied, “Already?”[5])
Little did we imagine that the morning after we entered Amsterdam, we would find the city under quarantine…
Guillaume Georges Elmar, Notes Toward a Memoir
With the advent of the telegraph, it became possible for both national embassies and spies to relay secret information to their home government under the nose of the regime—provided it was done in code. The British Foreign Office, under Palmerston, was very quick to take advantage of this in communication with its overseas embassies. It was routine for an embassy to wire its messages to Anvers via the new system, and for this to include both official messages and personal messages from the ambassador and embassy staff. Palmerston used this to implement a steganographic null cipher which not only obscured the meaning of the secret message, but allowed it to look like a perfectly normal and innocuous uncoded message. If the message began with the words “GOOD MORNING,” it meant the following:
• The message (ostensibly coming from the ambassador or a member of his staff) was in fact intended to describe the activity of a part of the government. In the case of the embassy to France, the ambassador (George C. Canning in 1838) represented the Emperor and his staff, his wife represented the Imperial household, his secretary Mr. Cousins represented the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher who ran the kitchen stood for (respectively) the French army and navy, and so on.
• Only every third line (beginning with “GOOD MORNING”) was significant—the rest was filler.
• Family names signified different nearby states. “Auclair” meant Austria, “Bacque” meant Baden, “Brizard” signified Britain, and so on.
Thus, the seemingly innocent message sent on July 10, 1838:
COUSINS BRITISH EMBASSY PARIS 071038 PNKT
GOOD MORNING PNKT
WEATHER STILL RAINY PNKT
MAKING FRIENDS WITH NEVEUX HOUSEHOLD STAFF PNKT
BOUGHT WIFE NEW DRESS PNKT
SHE LOVES PLUM AND ROSOLET PATTERN PNKT
LOU TAKING TRIP NORTH PNKT
…in fact meant that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was undermining the government of the Netherlands (“Neveux”), and that…
P.G. Sherman, A History of 19th-Century Espionage
According to biologists, the species Homo sapiens defines the extreme margaritic end of the “spar-mar spectrum[6].” There is no creature on Earth that invests more time and effort into the care of individual offspring than we do, and no surer way to provoke us to violence than to harm them.
And the steps King William was taking to make it impossible to receive a smallpox vaccination within the Netherlands—culminating in his ’37 decree outlawing the practice altogether—were already known to be harmful, as shown by the effort that middle-class parents went to in order to circumvent them. In the north, they took their children to Emden and Nordhorn in Hanover, and in the east they went up the Rhine to Duisburg in Prussia—both kingdoms where universal vaccination was not merely encouraged but mandatory. From Rotterdam, the Hague, and Haarlem, day-trippers took steamboats not only to London, but to Southend, Colcester, Ipswich, Felixstowe, and in some cases as far north as Newcastle in search of a doctor who had time and vaccine to spare.
And in the south, they crossed the border to go to Nimègue, Bois-le-Duc[7], Bréda, and Middelbourg, where they could at least be fairly sure of finding a doctor who spoke Dutch—and Anvers, a sprawling city of half a million[8] where they might find any sort of doctor they needed. The Dutch-language newspapers in these cities had of course taken a dim view of William’s government all along, but their criticism no longer sounded like the Liberal or Jacobin party line—now it was far more detailed…
It was during the outbreak in the summer of 1839 that Samuel Sarphati first made a name for himself. At this point, he was a medical student in Leiden, not yet a doctor. But by June, many parents who couldn’t find a fully qualified doctor were willing to turn to medical students for assistance. He was more than willing to offer free assistance to the poor, of whatever religion, but there was little he could do beyond make their children more comfortable.
He spelled this out in his pamphlet, On the Treatment of Smallpox in the Body of the State, which he and several friends commandeered the university press in order to print. “Once smallpox has its hooks in a child’s body, there is little any man of medicine can do,” he wrote. “The only treatment is vaccination, and that must be administered before the sickness strikes. Those who have misled His Majesty in this matter must be held accountable.”
When the authorities came on July 16 to track down the people responsible for the pamplet, Sarphati confessed openly and claimed to have done all the work printing it himself. He was immediately arrested.
Word spread throughout the Netherlands that the king had arrested a man who had helped poor parents for free. With over fifteen thousand children already dead of smallpox and the outbreak not over yet, the streets in every city exploded with rage. As the ambassador from the Court of St. James wrote back July 26: “In Amsterdam today, the poorest Christians are rioting in support of a Jew. I do not like the monarchy’s chances.” Whitehall was thus given a little forewarning…
The ship carrying the news of the conquest of Mindanao, the Haai, took storm damage rounding the Horn and had to spend two months in Buenos Aires undergoing repairs. As a result, King William first learned of the conquest from Spanish sources, and at about the same time and in as much detail as his better-informed subjects did. This did not stop him from planning a public celebration on Sunday, July 29—the first public event of any kind he had permitted since his wife’s funeral—after the Haai’s arrival made the news official.
With the streets of Amsterdam under curfew in an attempt to suppress the rioting, the king hastily reduced the size of the event, rescinding the invitations of over 300 of the city’s movers and shakers in favor of the 150 or so he felt certain he could trust. Normally this would be a blunder that a monarch would spend years recovering from, but in this case it hardly mattered.
Dutch, like all purely Euro-Aryan[9] languages, has no clusivity. The words “we,” “us,” “our,” or “ours” are irreducibly ambiguous and must be judged from context. When William told his audience in the Royal Palace on July 29 “Mindanao is ours,” he certainly meant for every single one of his listeners to feel themselves included in that statement.
And yet most of them were not, a fact they knew perfectly well. Forty percent of the shares in the Mindanao Company were the property of the treasury of the Netherlands. Another eleven percent was owned by King William himself. Another thirty percent had been distributed among various local sultans to further bind them to the Dutch colonial enterprise.[10] The remaining shares had already been purchased by the Royal Bank in London, which could see which way the wind was blowing in the Philippines and wanted to profit by the situation.
Lilian Reehorst, Rise and Fall of the House of Orange-Nassau (Eng. trans.)
It was that summer in Amsterdam that I saw with my own eyes for the first time how a small elite will hoard for themselves not only wealth, but opportunity, from not only the poor but the middle-class and ultimately all but themselves; and what can happen as a result…
Guillaume Georges Elmar, Notes Toward a Memoir
[1] G.G. is the oldest of six living children. Marguerite is his sister, and is two years younger.
[2] As IOTL, King William’s wife died in 1837. The difference is that at this point, there was a lot more public unhappiness with him, so that the minute the people began assembling for the funeral, they were like, “Since we’re all here, there’s some things we’ve been meaning to discuss with you, Your Majesty…”
[3] Annaba, in Algeria
[4] Louis Bonaparte, briefly king of Holland during the war.
[5] Talleyrand died this year IOTL as well, and the same joke was made.
[6] Spargent (from the Latin
spargens, “scattering”) reproduction and margaritic (from the Latin
margarita, “pearl,” as in “pearl of great price”) reproduction are ITTL’s terms for R-selection and K-selection, respectively.
[7] Nijmegen and s’Hertogenbosch
[8] Much larger than Antwerp at this point IOTL, of course
[9] The author is leaving out certain creole languages that do have clusivity. (And yes, Euro-Aryan is ITTL’s equivalent of Indo-European, but don’t worry. I promise ITTL “Aryan” is never going to mean anything more than what we call Proto-Indo-Iranian.)
[10] Maguindanao, Maguindanao-Davao, and the various Lanao sultanates. Between them, they officially control more than half the island.
