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What if Louis Napoleon skipped the adventures of starting the Crimean War, the War of Italian independence with Austria, the Mexican intervention and empire and avoid declaring war on Prussia.

Napoleon in this case takes the Bismarckian view that France is "satiated" in Europe. His main sop to domestic Catholic opinion is he chooses to have French troops remain the protector of the Pope in Rome and Lazio.

He also does not do anything more than a multilateral debt collection mission to Mexico, not sponsoring the Mexican empire.

However, to exercise his adventurist spirit, he accelerates French efforts to expand in all the areas France expanded to in the 1870s and 1880s and beyond.

So, this means seizing Tunis in the 1850s or 1860s and possibly going for Morocco later. Trying more expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, although success may be elusive until medical tech increases.

It also means accelerating campaigns in Indochina. In OTL Louis Napoleon secured Cochin-china and Cambodia and then France took a break in further expansion until the 1870s and 1880s. What if Louis Napoleon support campaigns to subdue central and northern Vietnam in the 1860s, and put them under French protectorate?

I think if the French are making the Indochina moves earlier, China will be less likely to go to war to oppose France, because it is dealing with the Taiping rebellion until the late 1860s and other regional rebellions until the middle 1870s.

I imagine the minimum British reaction would be to speed up their own competitive imperialism in Africa and Southeast Asia. At a maximum it could lead to competition getting out of hand.

Areas where France could possibly show a stronger hand overseas by being more placid in Europe could possibly be: more of sub-saharan Africa/Congo/Ethiopia. Libya and Egypt. Korea and Japan. Hawaii and the Pacific.

Even if France does not make an empire any more extensive than OTL's, the effects of an earlier consolidated French overseas Empire are interesting to contemplate. On the one hand, this may increase the net amount of time under French rule and deepen French cultural influence in colonies compared to OTL.

On the other hand, European colonialism and associated education and propagation of enlightenment/modern ideas had a way of spurring colonial demands for self-government and independence. Perhaps setting up a more thorough colonial administration in Tunis, Morocco and Vietnam in the 1860s means that by the 1920s or so, France is facing major ongoing insurgency problems in these colonies, or at least mass political agitation?

Your thoughts?
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