In Europe Triple Alliance hegemony was assured as France would never rise again and because of their newfound nuclear power whereas their only reasonable competitor for European power that remained after the fall of France, Britain, had been cast down and was not a threat as they could not develop nuclear weapons of their own as part of the peace deal and were cast out of Europe economically as well by the ECPS as the directorate (Germany, Italy and Russia) installed even stiffer tariffs than before against the Empire. In 1951 Spain and Portugal were inducted into the ECPS as candidate members, both Spain and Portugal were seen as nothing more than hanger-ons which wouldn’t be a threat by themselves as they were too weak to start any kinds of European war without France and/or Britain. And dynastic troubles had nearly prevented Alfonso XIV from signing his fateful alliance with Napoleonic-Gaullist France but his British mother, Mary, Princess Royal, however used her court ties with Britain and influence over her son to set Spain on this course and ultimately drag in Britain’s longstanding Portuguese allies which became Spanish puppets. After the defeat, Spain was restored to a democratic government, even if that government was still had somewhat reactionary tendencies although the Germans and Italians didn’t care much. This candidate membership gave them access to European markets (but not yet a vote in the ECPS ruling bodies) which helped soothe the economic problems of Spain and Portugal which started almost immediately after the war with the end of French and British investment. This also had the positive effect of easing hard feelings in Spain and Portugal against the Triple Alliance as they were not locked out of their European community like France and Britain immediately after the Great War (by the late 1920s it was too late to reverse the path of rising totalitarianism which France and Britain had followed as resentment had poisoned them and mere membership was unbefitting ex-great powers like France and Britain). This ensured that Spain and Portugal acting up again was considered implausible if not unrealistic by even the most pessimistic armchair political analysts, not to mention the Spanish and Portuguese themselves who were busy rebuilding like the rest of Europe. By this time the European economy was once again booming and Europe continued into the future, confident because of victory in the war.
It was in that same year of 1951 that Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm V died of a heart attack, leaving the throne to his son, crown prince Wilhelm who was crowned Emperor Wilhelm III of Germany and King of Prussia and his wife became Empress Juliana I of Germany and Queen of Prussia. Although Friedrich Wilhelm V had never quite been able to step out of his father’s shadow completely, he was remembered as a great Emperor who had led Germany through its darkest hour in the war which was what he wanted. The new ruling pair of Germany did not receive the Dutch crown yet as Queen Wilhelmina didn’t see fit to abdicate, she was healthy and strong and considered herself able to rule her kingdom by herself and not let a German prince take over. She received increasing pressure and criticism from both Japan and the United States regarding the Dutch East Indies which were becoming restless with the return of Dutch colonial rule. Any rebellion however was killed in the cradle as German intelligence tracked Sukarno down who was hiding on the border region between Sarawak and Borneo. He was arrested him along with several other Indonesian nationalists and because neither China nor Japan were in a position yet to start flaring up Asian nationalism for their own reasons (China had just ended a civil war and was poor, Japan was still rebuilding and their allies kept them on a leash as they didn’t want to fight a nuclear war over decolonisation and because they had colonies over their own which forced Japan to down tone any anti-colonialist stirrings). Thusly Wilhelmina kept the throne as she was able to rule with firm hand and kept much of her popularity as she took it upon herself to rebuild Holland after the damage that the French had done. Holland’s southern neighbour Wallonia was not in such a good state as a constitutional crisis had almost immediately erupted after the end of the war (during the war it was buried to not decrease Walloon morale) over King Leopold’s second marriage with a commoner which decreased his popularity and authority in the eyes of many Walloons. Parliament made the decision to style his wife princess instead of Queen of Wallonia and any children from the marriage would not have rights to the throne. King Leopold III clashed with his government over the issue and in the ensuing crisis he abdicated in favour of his son who was crowned Baudouin I of Wallonia in 1946 at the young age of fifteen with his eldest sister, Princess Joséphine-Charlotte of Wallonia, being appointed regent until his eighteenth birthday in 1949.
In spite of European power and their victory in the war, colonial unrest in Asia continued (ironically starting in Japanese occupied Vietnam) which forced the colonial powers to continue their large military expenditures. Many however recognised quite quickly that gross overspending, weariness from the long colonial wars and arrogance had been the main causes of the depression that hit in 1927 and continued for much of the 1930s and from which the world was only slowly recovering by the outbreak of the war. By 1950 Europe was well on its way up again with strong growth but economists knew that it wasn’t going to last and that the mistakes of past times needed to be avoided if war was to be avoided; the depression had shook the ECPS to its core foundations even if it remained a unity thanks to the ties between the monarchs who knew that their unity was their strength, especially with Europe uniting under the banner of European superiority which the ECPS propagated; Spain and Portugal joined as candidate members in 1951 and as full members in 1954, longstanding unwilling clients Romania and Serbia became members in 1955 as they realized that a snowball’s chance in hell was bigger than them settling their scores with Hungary and Bulgaria and that economic benefits in aiding in the rebuilding of Europe were too great to pass up. Also, Romania and Serbia hadn’t been openly hostile or dissenting from their hegemony since the Second Balkan War in 1915 which had earned them a certain degree of trust in Rome, Berlin and St. Petersburg which effectively governed the Balkans via their Hungarian, Bulgarian, Greek, Montenegrin and Croat proxies who followed their patrons in toning down their hostile sentiments against Romania and Serbia, easing the transition to full ECPS membership. In response to European rule an uprising occurred in Sarawak in 1952 which, although violently put down, caused the Europeans to get their act together and do something. In 1955 the leaders of the prime ECPS colonial powers in Asia (the Netherlands, Germany and Italy) convened and came to a plan to solve the problems in Asia. They granted the colonies a deal and made it clear to them that it was the only deal they would get, if they refused life would continue as usual and any colonial uprisings would be crushed. They gave the colonies a deal very similar to Dominion status in the British Empire and the American Commonwealth and their status would become similar to that of India and Canada: they received their own ruling bodies which would govern internal affairs, military and foreign affairs would remain under strict European supervision and the colonies weren’t allowed to sign treaties or establish diplomatic relations with alien powers without consent, on matters effecting not the colony but the empire that they were part of as a whole, mutual consent was required before making a decision and they all recognised the monarch of their respective motherland as their official head of state. They accepted as they recognised they didn’t have much choice and would face brute reprisals if they resisted and fought for full independence (the Europeans saw themselves as civilized but had shown their ability to cruelty in the 1920s when they had used chemical weapons, deportation of thousands to concentration camps and many executions in the 20th century’s first genocide in their attempt to crush dissent). The colonials however saw it as a compromise and figured that eventual more concessions could be squeezed out of the Europeans now that a beginning had been made). Decolonization did not take place in Africa as all the colonial powers thought that the African peoples, specifically the non-Arab sub-Saharan peoples, were too primitive to have a national identity of their own, unlike the Asians which (thanks to Japanese strength in the war) were regarded as at least semi-civilized and capable of nationalism. This would later shown to be a wrong assumption.
Britain at this time was experiencing its own share of post-war troubles. Three of its cities (Manchester, Liverpool and Hull) had been devastated by nuclear weapons and they had seen their due for the bombing campaign against German cities and had lost at least 1.5 million men in fighting that had taken place across the globe. Also, the economy was in shambles and Britain’s traditional European markets were now even more closed off then before as the nations of Europe wanted to protect their markets from cheaper products from the British Empire, leading to a deep recession and sharp decline in popularity of the BNP regime which was only aggravated by Alliance fuelled unrest in the colonies (although that never amounted to more than sporadic resistance as none of these groups were organized very well) and the fact that the industrial centres of Liverpool, Manchester and Hull were gone. For the foreseeable future however Britain could float on loans and investment from America and the opening up of South American markets thanks to American lobbying; this way Britain recovered its status as big investor in South America (especially in the southern cone, Argentina and Chile) although their investments never reached the peak heights of the British Empire during the Edwardian age again. Also, like Wallonia, Britain was facing a constitutional crisis because of Edward VIII’s relationship with Wallis Warfield, a mere commoner. During the war and the 1930s their relationship had been kept a secret and she remained only a mistress; Churchill insisted on this as he and Mosley didn’t want a blemish on their regime which stood for traditional values.
In 1946 however Edward announced his intention to marry his long-time lover and a crisis ensued although Churchill and Mosley quickly managed to turn it into a propaganda stunt, unlike the unlucky Walloon king Leopold III. In BNP propaganda it was portrayed as if Britain had now truly reached the egalitarian society that was desired now that the war had purged the nation of impure elements of the old age when the Empire was at its peak and that the best that the British Empire now had was all that was left now. This way Churchill avoided a blemish on the British regime as most people bought it (Britain had been fed propaganda like this for decades and was indoctrinated to a degree) and also ensured that new royal dynastic troubles wouldn’t weaken his regime’s grip on power. Apart from this, nothing could delay or distract the diligent Brits from rebuilding their country and undoing the damage that the nuclear bombardment had done to some of the most important cities in Great Britain and entering a new age of prosperity, as BNP propaganda said that Britain was rid of its anachronistic, subversive and weak elements and that French weakness and the Alliance’s stranglehold over the continent was the only reason they had escaped retaliation. Britain would be strong again one day if it was up to the BNP. This anti-European propaganda also led to Britain drifting more and more into America’s sphere of influence and even alienating their former French allies which they blamed for their defeat in the war citing lack of will to fight and blunders on France’s part as the cause, leading to a shift in attitude in certain circles of the French government which was already moving away from the still totalitarian British.
Seeing as France’s allies were all going their own way, France adapted to the new situation, even if they did so reluctantly as their was still a sizable measure of resentment against occupational forces as well as the old elite which they blamed for the defeat of France in the war. Their however were certain problems with the Fifth Republic that the new and inexperienced rulers of France couldn’t solve even with all their enthusiasm and idealism. It helped a great deal that there were no war reparations so that inflation was kept down to reasonable level for a defeated country in an immediate post-war crisis situation. It also helped a lot that German and Italian occupational forces violently put down any resistance against their new vassal government. But that was the Fifth Republics problem, they were seen as too much of a German-Italian puppet government and sycophants who obeyed every whim that the people in Berlin and Rome got into their heads. Also, France had been a very centralized regime for much of its history; even though attempts had been made to make France a republic, an idea which was resurrected seemingly from the grave several times, France remained fundamentally an authoritarian nation, much like their Spanish, German and Italian neighbours, and the idea had failed every time thus far for various reasons, some of which came back to haunt the Fifth Republic along with new problems. And how could it work, seeing France’s past and what their history was like. Out of the 146 turbulent years that had past between 1800 and the official abolition of the Third Empire and thus the monarchy in 1946 in which France had seen the rise of the three Napoleonic Empires, the Bourbon Restorations (first in 1814 and the second in 1889) and two world wars, France had been a monarchy for 103 years, over a century, with only intermittent periods of republicanism in France and France had always been at the peak of its power, stature and glory during the monarchist rule and not the republics’ rule. In 1965 France was granted a candidate membership for the ECPS as it was clear that the French weren’t trying to go for a comeback and because so far the new French government had proven cooperative (as part of their strategy to at least restore France to a certain degree as an influential power in Europe of course). Also, Britain and America were still there and the former had been spewing anti-French propaganda ever since the end of the war, blaming France for the defeat. ECPS economic benefits and the prospect of finally being accepted into the European community after years of mistrust and the Allies looking over their shoulder didn’t end the Fifth Republic’s problems. Due to the very decentralized nature of this state, it was plagued by corruption as government officials didn’t have to be afraid anymore of government agents spying on them or unannounced check-ups on their administrations and the resulting hefty reprisals (ranging from three months in prison and losing one’s job to the death sentence in extreme cases). The previous Natipop regime kept a tight leash on government officials. If there was one thing that Charles de Gaulle despised, it was corruption. Sometimes these acts of corruption would be revealed and would embarrass the Fifth Republic, leading to Neo-Natipops making noise now and again via the new Parti National-Solidaire (PNS) which acted as their mouthpiece even though it was outlawed and was a fringe group. In the resulting 1966 elections the unpopular social-democrats and republicans were swept away as a punishment for their abuse of power and economic blundering. Demonstrations had been going on for months after a series of scandals involving government officials and because the economy had entered a slump. The opposition parties (the royalist and nationalist Action Française, the Catholics, the right-liberals) together managed to attain a majority with 65% of popular vote with the Catholics gaining 35%, the right-liberals 12% and the AF 18%. The last one however insisted on the restoration of the Orléanist Bourbons in return for them taking part in a coalition, they were however forced to compromise and accept a purely constitutional monarchy. The Catholics and right-liberals were left no choice lest they wanted to ally with the now disgraced social-democrats and republicans which would surely lose them their support and the AF understood that this was all they would get (a monarchy was also seen as a stabilizing factor in France which contributed to the decision). It was time for the end of the Fifth Republic, it would the demise of republicanism in France. It was also time for the Third Bourbon restoration and Henri, Comte de Paris, was crowned King Henry VI of France. The end of the Fifth Republic was a fact and France would never be a republic again.
This also caused some faith in the surrounding countries about France’s friendly intentions as the new Kingdom of France was much more stabile. With Britain, America, China and Japan all on the rise, France was finally admitted into the ECPS in 1967 although a seat in the directory was a bridge too far. Japan had tested a nuclear weapon in 1957. Both Germany and America had created hydrogen bombs in 1952 with Italy and Russia following in 1954 and 1955 respectively and Japan followed suit in 1962. China would test an atomic bomb in 1969 after several years of struggling to get one (the Alliance wasn’t helpful as they weren’t keen on the idea of a nuclear armed China). Also, America was stationing bombers and missiles in Great Britain.
The nuclear arms race and space race and military build-up was a major point of concern (explaining why France was admitted into the ECPS after two decades of occupation and under scrutiny of the Allies). Both the Alliance and the Americans possessed thousands of nuclear weapons with Russia holding the highest absolute number of nuclear weapons (although Germany and America possessed much more advanced delivery systems during the 50s and 60s). In the space race the Alliance and the American Commonwealth were roughly equal. Both had sent satellites up into space (Germany in 1955 and America in 1957), a man into orbit (Germany in 1961 and the Americans that same year) and a manned mission to the moon was planned for 1969 with America and Germany setting foot on the moon in rapid succession. It was during this time period that Germany received an additional boost in power and prestige with the death of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in 1962 after a reign of over 72 years and Juliana ascended the throne as Queen Juliana I of Holland while her husband could add the title King of the Netherlands to his titles of Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia as he was crowned King Willem IV of the Netherlands (as opposed to prince-consort which was originally intended to be the title of the one who married Princess Juliana). It was said that Wilhelmina had ruled until the end of her life to prevent the personal union between her country and Germany as she greatly valued Dutch independence and sovereignty, even if she was pro-German and had been friends with the late Emperor Wilhelm II. The new king however proved to be a good king as he didn’t attempt to turn Holland into a vassal (although he proclaimed that all the lands of the Holy Roman Empire were now united). This greatly strengthened the German economy as Germany now controlled imports into the German and European hinterland via the vast system of canals that linked Europe’s major rivers. Germany and Europe were marching toward a bright future, a future however that would be marred by troubles.
It was in that same year of 1951 that Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm V died of a heart attack, leaving the throne to his son, crown prince Wilhelm who was crowned Emperor Wilhelm III of Germany and King of Prussia and his wife became Empress Juliana I of Germany and Queen of Prussia. Although Friedrich Wilhelm V had never quite been able to step out of his father’s shadow completely, he was remembered as a great Emperor who had led Germany through its darkest hour in the war which was what he wanted. The new ruling pair of Germany did not receive the Dutch crown yet as Queen Wilhelmina didn’t see fit to abdicate, she was healthy and strong and considered herself able to rule her kingdom by herself and not let a German prince take over. She received increasing pressure and criticism from both Japan and the United States regarding the Dutch East Indies which were becoming restless with the return of Dutch colonial rule. Any rebellion however was killed in the cradle as German intelligence tracked Sukarno down who was hiding on the border region between Sarawak and Borneo. He was arrested him along with several other Indonesian nationalists and because neither China nor Japan were in a position yet to start flaring up Asian nationalism for their own reasons (China had just ended a civil war and was poor, Japan was still rebuilding and their allies kept them on a leash as they didn’t want to fight a nuclear war over decolonisation and because they had colonies over their own which forced Japan to down tone any anti-colonialist stirrings). Thusly Wilhelmina kept the throne as she was able to rule with firm hand and kept much of her popularity as she took it upon herself to rebuild Holland after the damage that the French had done. Holland’s southern neighbour Wallonia was not in such a good state as a constitutional crisis had almost immediately erupted after the end of the war (during the war it was buried to not decrease Walloon morale) over King Leopold’s second marriage with a commoner which decreased his popularity and authority in the eyes of many Walloons. Parliament made the decision to style his wife princess instead of Queen of Wallonia and any children from the marriage would not have rights to the throne. King Leopold III clashed with his government over the issue and in the ensuing crisis he abdicated in favour of his son who was crowned Baudouin I of Wallonia in 1946 at the young age of fifteen with his eldest sister, Princess Joséphine-Charlotte of Wallonia, being appointed regent until his eighteenth birthday in 1949.
In spite of European power and their victory in the war, colonial unrest in Asia continued (ironically starting in Japanese occupied Vietnam) which forced the colonial powers to continue their large military expenditures. Many however recognised quite quickly that gross overspending, weariness from the long colonial wars and arrogance had been the main causes of the depression that hit in 1927 and continued for much of the 1930s and from which the world was only slowly recovering by the outbreak of the war. By 1950 Europe was well on its way up again with strong growth but economists knew that it wasn’t going to last and that the mistakes of past times needed to be avoided if war was to be avoided; the depression had shook the ECPS to its core foundations even if it remained a unity thanks to the ties between the monarchs who knew that their unity was their strength, especially with Europe uniting under the banner of European superiority which the ECPS propagated; Spain and Portugal joined as candidate members in 1951 and as full members in 1954, longstanding unwilling clients Romania and Serbia became members in 1955 as they realized that a snowball’s chance in hell was bigger than them settling their scores with Hungary and Bulgaria and that economic benefits in aiding in the rebuilding of Europe were too great to pass up. Also, Romania and Serbia hadn’t been openly hostile or dissenting from their hegemony since the Second Balkan War in 1915 which had earned them a certain degree of trust in Rome, Berlin and St. Petersburg which effectively governed the Balkans via their Hungarian, Bulgarian, Greek, Montenegrin and Croat proxies who followed their patrons in toning down their hostile sentiments against Romania and Serbia, easing the transition to full ECPS membership. In response to European rule an uprising occurred in Sarawak in 1952 which, although violently put down, caused the Europeans to get their act together and do something. In 1955 the leaders of the prime ECPS colonial powers in Asia (the Netherlands, Germany and Italy) convened and came to a plan to solve the problems in Asia. They granted the colonies a deal and made it clear to them that it was the only deal they would get, if they refused life would continue as usual and any colonial uprisings would be crushed. They gave the colonies a deal very similar to Dominion status in the British Empire and the American Commonwealth and their status would become similar to that of India and Canada: they received their own ruling bodies which would govern internal affairs, military and foreign affairs would remain under strict European supervision and the colonies weren’t allowed to sign treaties or establish diplomatic relations with alien powers without consent, on matters effecting not the colony but the empire that they were part of as a whole, mutual consent was required before making a decision and they all recognised the monarch of their respective motherland as their official head of state. They accepted as they recognised they didn’t have much choice and would face brute reprisals if they resisted and fought for full independence (the Europeans saw themselves as civilized but had shown their ability to cruelty in the 1920s when they had used chemical weapons, deportation of thousands to concentration camps and many executions in the 20th century’s first genocide in their attempt to crush dissent). The colonials however saw it as a compromise and figured that eventual more concessions could be squeezed out of the Europeans now that a beginning had been made). Decolonization did not take place in Africa as all the colonial powers thought that the African peoples, specifically the non-Arab sub-Saharan peoples, were too primitive to have a national identity of their own, unlike the Asians which (thanks to Japanese strength in the war) were regarded as at least semi-civilized and capable of nationalism. This would later shown to be a wrong assumption.
Britain at this time was experiencing its own share of post-war troubles. Three of its cities (Manchester, Liverpool and Hull) had been devastated by nuclear weapons and they had seen their due for the bombing campaign against German cities and had lost at least 1.5 million men in fighting that had taken place across the globe. Also, the economy was in shambles and Britain’s traditional European markets were now even more closed off then before as the nations of Europe wanted to protect their markets from cheaper products from the British Empire, leading to a deep recession and sharp decline in popularity of the BNP regime which was only aggravated by Alliance fuelled unrest in the colonies (although that never amounted to more than sporadic resistance as none of these groups were organized very well) and the fact that the industrial centres of Liverpool, Manchester and Hull were gone. For the foreseeable future however Britain could float on loans and investment from America and the opening up of South American markets thanks to American lobbying; this way Britain recovered its status as big investor in South America (especially in the southern cone, Argentina and Chile) although their investments never reached the peak heights of the British Empire during the Edwardian age again. Also, like Wallonia, Britain was facing a constitutional crisis because of Edward VIII’s relationship with Wallis Warfield, a mere commoner. During the war and the 1930s their relationship had been kept a secret and she remained only a mistress; Churchill insisted on this as he and Mosley didn’t want a blemish on their regime which stood for traditional values.
In 1946 however Edward announced his intention to marry his long-time lover and a crisis ensued although Churchill and Mosley quickly managed to turn it into a propaganda stunt, unlike the unlucky Walloon king Leopold III. In BNP propaganda it was portrayed as if Britain had now truly reached the egalitarian society that was desired now that the war had purged the nation of impure elements of the old age when the Empire was at its peak and that the best that the British Empire now had was all that was left now. This way Churchill avoided a blemish on the British regime as most people bought it (Britain had been fed propaganda like this for decades and was indoctrinated to a degree) and also ensured that new royal dynastic troubles wouldn’t weaken his regime’s grip on power. Apart from this, nothing could delay or distract the diligent Brits from rebuilding their country and undoing the damage that the nuclear bombardment had done to some of the most important cities in Great Britain and entering a new age of prosperity, as BNP propaganda said that Britain was rid of its anachronistic, subversive and weak elements and that French weakness and the Alliance’s stranglehold over the continent was the only reason they had escaped retaliation. Britain would be strong again one day if it was up to the BNP. This anti-European propaganda also led to Britain drifting more and more into America’s sphere of influence and even alienating their former French allies which they blamed for their defeat in the war citing lack of will to fight and blunders on France’s part as the cause, leading to a shift in attitude in certain circles of the French government which was already moving away from the still totalitarian British.
Seeing as France’s allies were all going their own way, France adapted to the new situation, even if they did so reluctantly as their was still a sizable measure of resentment against occupational forces as well as the old elite which they blamed for the defeat of France in the war. Their however were certain problems with the Fifth Republic that the new and inexperienced rulers of France couldn’t solve even with all their enthusiasm and idealism. It helped a great deal that there were no war reparations so that inflation was kept down to reasonable level for a defeated country in an immediate post-war crisis situation. It also helped a lot that German and Italian occupational forces violently put down any resistance against their new vassal government. But that was the Fifth Republics problem, they were seen as too much of a German-Italian puppet government and sycophants who obeyed every whim that the people in Berlin and Rome got into their heads. Also, France had been a very centralized regime for much of its history; even though attempts had been made to make France a republic, an idea which was resurrected seemingly from the grave several times, France remained fundamentally an authoritarian nation, much like their Spanish, German and Italian neighbours, and the idea had failed every time thus far for various reasons, some of which came back to haunt the Fifth Republic along with new problems. And how could it work, seeing France’s past and what their history was like. Out of the 146 turbulent years that had past between 1800 and the official abolition of the Third Empire and thus the monarchy in 1946 in which France had seen the rise of the three Napoleonic Empires, the Bourbon Restorations (first in 1814 and the second in 1889) and two world wars, France had been a monarchy for 103 years, over a century, with only intermittent periods of republicanism in France and France had always been at the peak of its power, stature and glory during the monarchist rule and not the republics’ rule. In 1965 France was granted a candidate membership for the ECPS as it was clear that the French weren’t trying to go for a comeback and because so far the new French government had proven cooperative (as part of their strategy to at least restore France to a certain degree as an influential power in Europe of course). Also, Britain and America were still there and the former had been spewing anti-French propaganda ever since the end of the war, blaming France for the defeat. ECPS economic benefits and the prospect of finally being accepted into the European community after years of mistrust and the Allies looking over their shoulder didn’t end the Fifth Republic’s problems. Due to the very decentralized nature of this state, it was plagued by corruption as government officials didn’t have to be afraid anymore of government agents spying on them or unannounced check-ups on their administrations and the resulting hefty reprisals (ranging from three months in prison and losing one’s job to the death sentence in extreme cases). The previous Natipop regime kept a tight leash on government officials. If there was one thing that Charles de Gaulle despised, it was corruption. Sometimes these acts of corruption would be revealed and would embarrass the Fifth Republic, leading to Neo-Natipops making noise now and again via the new Parti National-Solidaire (PNS) which acted as their mouthpiece even though it was outlawed and was a fringe group. In the resulting 1966 elections the unpopular social-democrats and republicans were swept away as a punishment for their abuse of power and economic blundering. Demonstrations had been going on for months after a series of scandals involving government officials and because the economy had entered a slump. The opposition parties (the royalist and nationalist Action Française, the Catholics, the right-liberals) together managed to attain a majority with 65% of popular vote with the Catholics gaining 35%, the right-liberals 12% and the AF 18%. The last one however insisted on the restoration of the Orléanist Bourbons in return for them taking part in a coalition, they were however forced to compromise and accept a purely constitutional monarchy. The Catholics and right-liberals were left no choice lest they wanted to ally with the now disgraced social-democrats and republicans which would surely lose them their support and the AF understood that this was all they would get (a monarchy was also seen as a stabilizing factor in France which contributed to the decision). It was time for the end of the Fifth Republic, it would the demise of republicanism in France. It was also time for the Third Bourbon restoration and Henri, Comte de Paris, was crowned King Henry VI of France. The end of the Fifth Republic was a fact and France would never be a republic again.
This also caused some faith in the surrounding countries about France’s friendly intentions as the new Kingdom of France was much more stabile. With Britain, America, China and Japan all on the rise, France was finally admitted into the ECPS in 1967 although a seat in the directory was a bridge too far. Japan had tested a nuclear weapon in 1957. Both Germany and America had created hydrogen bombs in 1952 with Italy and Russia following in 1954 and 1955 respectively and Japan followed suit in 1962. China would test an atomic bomb in 1969 after several years of struggling to get one (the Alliance wasn’t helpful as they weren’t keen on the idea of a nuclear armed China). Also, America was stationing bombers and missiles in Great Britain.
The nuclear arms race and space race and military build-up was a major point of concern (explaining why France was admitted into the ECPS after two decades of occupation and under scrutiny of the Allies). Both the Alliance and the Americans possessed thousands of nuclear weapons with Russia holding the highest absolute number of nuclear weapons (although Germany and America possessed much more advanced delivery systems during the 50s and 60s). In the space race the Alliance and the American Commonwealth were roughly equal. Both had sent satellites up into space (Germany in 1955 and America in 1957), a man into orbit (Germany in 1961 and the Americans that same year) and a manned mission to the moon was planned for 1969 with America and Germany setting foot on the moon in rapid succession. It was during this time period that Germany received an additional boost in power and prestige with the death of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in 1962 after a reign of over 72 years and Juliana ascended the throne as Queen Juliana I of Holland while her husband could add the title King of the Netherlands to his titles of Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia as he was crowned King Willem IV of the Netherlands (as opposed to prince-consort which was originally intended to be the title of the one who married Princess Juliana). It was said that Wilhelmina had ruled until the end of her life to prevent the personal union between her country and Germany as she greatly valued Dutch independence and sovereignty, even if she was pro-German and had been friends with the late Emperor Wilhelm II. The new king however proved to be a good king as he didn’t attempt to turn Holland into a vassal (although he proclaimed that all the lands of the Holy Roman Empire were now united). This greatly strengthened the German economy as Germany now controlled imports into the German and European hinterland via the vast system of canals that linked Europe’s major rivers. Germany and Europe were marching toward a bright future, a future however that would be marred by troubles.