The Revolutionary Wars of the 1700s - Collaborators and Contributors Wanted!

Hey there, alt-hist-peoples!

I've recently immigrated to these forums, and I'm looking for people interested in working together on fleshing out a timeline and universe. I have done a little collaborative worldbuilding before, and I think it'd be a great exercise cooperating on one.

So, what do I have in mind? To paraphrase my post on reddit about the same thing:

The basic idea is that in the period around 1750-1800, Europe becomes engulfed in a series of massive, interconnected wars. Much like our world's Napoleonic Wars, these end up drastically changing the map of Europe and the balance of powers. And rather like the Napoleonic Wars, it would pit Revolutionaries against Reactionaries; the dream of nation and freedom against the steel and gold of the old powers. Of course, that is the popular narrative, but countless other scores and feuds are addressed over the war as well. Unlike our Napoleonic Wars, it would be Germany at the forefront of the Revolutionary coalition.

How? Why? Well, that's our job to find out.

The concept is really to "reverse-engineer" a TL, having this setup as an end point, and then justifying how it ended up there. I have already made a bit of work in collaboration with another user, but anyone interested should not hesitate to say so! Post here, send me a PM - anything, really. I look forward to hearing from anyone interested.

- invisiblemonies
 
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Sounds great! Any contributions are appreciated. There will be posted an outline of what has already been made soon, but again, any bits and pieces are appreciated. Many drops make an ocean.
 
Hi there. So I've been talking to invisiblemonies here about this over on reddit and this is what we have so far.

  • 840: Louis the Pious divides his Empire among his three sons. For Charles the Bald, goes West Francia. For Lothair, goes Middle Francia. And for his incredibly less successful son, Louis "The German", goes East Francia, formerly known as Germania.
  • Louis "The German" screws it up, East Francia is divided into a bunch of tiny kingdoms, duchies, baronies and counties.
  • Middle Age ensues, the whole area formerly know as Germania is made a vassal state to the Kingdom of France.
  • The Vassal State of Germania is denied most of the help needed during the Black Plague, and is also denied of most of the benefits of the Northern Renaissance. The German people grow weary of their pitiful king, a puppet put there by France to kind of "unify" all of the little counties, baronies, duchies and territories of the former Germania.
  • Philosophical movements of the very late Renaissance start sparking in Germany, concerning personal freedom and liberty.
  • With the help of the Kingdom of England (under the fact that France is a common enemy) they sublevate against the German King, overthrowing him. In his position, they put another King, chosen by the people. Unfortunately, due to the fact that, for many centuries, they only had the French monarchy as reference, their monarchy was merely a copy of this model.
  • This French-modelled German monarchy works for a little while. However, middle and lower-class citizens start to feel it's a repeat of the very oppression the original revolt (the one in the bullet point above this one) was supposed to abolish.
  • Early 1700s. Anti-monarchical and nationalist sentiments spread and explode in what it's called the "Aachen Tea Party" (working title). The german people are hostile to the king and the monarchy. Dissident voices become louder and louder. Great disappointment and dissatisfaction among the population concerning the monarchy.
  • Some year in the Early-to-Mid-1700s: In the wake of a particularly tense military campaign, the monarchy is toppled, spearheaded by a cadre of generals and minor politicians. The explosive result of this is the spread of the desire for change all over Europe like a wildfire.
  • The new German Revolutionary state collapses due to the ensuing warfare across Europe and not being able to living up to its revolutionary promises. Due to the warfare, the generals become the strongest voice in the government.
  • A military junta is put in place in the new Revolutionary Germany.
If you have any ideas or corrections or thoughts, please do post them here or by PM to me or invisiblemonies. Mainly invisiblemonies, as I have barely any idea of what I'm doing :p.
 
Such an early PoD, in the 9th century, might easily butterfly away the Nation States we know altogether.
if you want a more freedom-loving German people, you don't need to change so much. In the 16th and 17th centuries, things could easily go into a Dutch-like or Swiss-like direction in more places. Maybe coupled with an alt-Reformation? Have two hundred years of open conflict between an urban, craft- and trade-oriented, proto-capitalist Germany pitted against a feudalist Germany in the checkerboard that was Central Europe. Then, growing manufacture-economy, scientific learning, and a few clever thinkers from both confessions create a pan-confessional, liberal, nationalist German movement
or something else.
but I'd think a PoD in the 15th century at the earliest is needed if we want England, France, Spain, Denmark, Poland and other nations we know around.
 
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Hmm, good point. The Holy Roman Empire and Austria presents a challenge here, since the former would have to undergo quite big changes, and the latter would probably have to play a smaller role in the grand scheme of things.
 
Austria indeed. It must be avoided that the reactionary parts just develop an "Austrian" identity. The HRE is basically irrelevant at least in the 17th century.
 
Or maybe that`s the clue: If Germany undergoes a more radical reformation and experiences something like its Glorious Revolution a few decades earlier than the OTL English one, yet this first experiment with republicanism fails and in the reconstruction, Austria absorbs large parts of a still rebellious Southern Germany, while the North is mostly occupied e.g. by Sweden, then the 18th century could bring a yet greater national-liberal revolution against the oppressive and/or "foreign" kingdoms / empires both in the North and South, with necessary implications for wider Europe.

Anyway, the most important condition for a German Revolution that is to resemble the French Revolution is to avoid the Thirty Years War in its massive devastations. What do you think about trading Germany`s fate in the 17th century with England`s, at least internally. (Not to say that England should undergo a Thirty Years War, just that Germany doesn`t. Otherwise we`re butterflying the British Empire away.)
 
Hmm, that doesn't seem like a bad idea. The question is then how to justify the rather sudden existence of a complete infrastructure capable of supporting a quickly expanding empire. Napoleon had the advantage that this was partially already in place for him.

Perhaps the rise of national sentiments prompts the "foreign" powers to a kind of compromise and create a neutral German monarchy. Germany is turned into a kind of "buffer state", similar to Belgium in our TL. While initially happy to see a kind-of-independent state, the Germany populace increasingly sees the monarchy as a mere continuation of former oppression. Thus, the spirit of revolt and revolution rises.
 
Your point about there being an infrastructure in place is good. But "Germany" is too big to be a buffer state (buffer against whom?), I fear. Neither of its centralising feudalist absolutist monarchist neighbours will want a unified German monarchy.

Whichever way it happens, the Germans must create the necessary structures "out of nothing", perhaps with their own "New Model Army" of two or one-and-a-half centuries ago as a blueprint. This means that they`ll have to fight at home first, to establish popular rule against various internal and externally supported opponents, before they can turn against others as a unified bloc - or maybe, which is more likely, as a strong federation.

This would be slightly different from France, but then again, isn`t that one of the objectives of such a timeline: to find out how a bourgeois-republican revolution with imperial implications would have gone, had it gone in Germany first instead of France? Whichever situation we`ll create, if it´s vastly identical, then it might have missed the peculiarities such a project could reveal.
 
Good points. I like the idea of a "New Model Army"-like process, a vanguard that eventually overtakes. If Germany then, after its revolt, becomes a federation, it would make sense if its centralisation happens gradually from here. Staying with the idea of a cadre of generals taking power, they could begin to consolidate power and take advantage of the popular ethos and paint the leaders of the constituent states as reactionaries and enemies of the people.

The idea of the "buffer state" was an attempt to explain why they'd have some semblance of infrastructure. But if France and Austria are both overextended, and the lack of German power has allowed the Scandinavian states greater influence, a German federal monarchy engineered through a compromise between the greater powers could be explained. Again, similar to Belgium and, to an extent, the Bourbon Restoration and the Weimar Republic. If the rival powers know they can't control Germany, at least they can impose a relatively inefficient government on it to curb it's power and the rise of revolutionary national sentiments.
 
The policy of upholding an inefficient federal system in Germany would in all likelihood take the form of upholding the Holy Roman Empire, which not only meets all of the above criteria, but also gives various neighbours a say in its business, too.

Do you really think that the revolutionary alternative needs to be unified? Could it not be federal, too? Throughout history, there were many military powerful federations, from the Phoenicians and the Greek to the USA.

A centralised Germany may be possible. But, at least in my imagination, it does not fit the nature of a German nation which has small "islands of Germanness" throughout Central-Eastern Europe, and which is in all likelihood still divided along confessional lines.
 
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