The Occitan Wall
In the aftermath of the bombing raid on Lyons, Napoleon IV immediately caught a plane back to France, via Algiers, to demand explanations of his cabinet.
De Gaulle, however, was unrepentant. The bombing, he insisted, was the inevitable result of the tiny French air force which left their skies exposed. This was a result of the priority given to industry and the army which were needed to make France great again.
As Napoleon had himself supported De Gaulle with this policy, overruling the objections of the air force, he was reluctantly forced to conclude that the situation could not have been avoided. No one could have expected the English to extend their bomber range so quickly and certainly no one could have imagined that the Union would risk their bombers flying all the way through the contested skies of northern France on a near suicide mission to strike at the Empire.
Instead, while Napoleon paid a well-publicised visit to Lyons to inspect the damage and commiserate with the victims of the “communard renegades hiding in perfidious Albion and conspiring to slaughter their fellow countrymen”, the Cabinet urgently began addressing the now dangerous lack of air defences across southern France.
One of the many bridges destroyed in the raid on Lyons
The meagre French air force was immediately gathered from its dispersed locations across the Empire and set to patrolling the skies of southern France. However, the small number of planes, all of them relics of the interwar years, would not be able to put up any substantial resistance against the Union’s heavy bombers. Instead, they would be a stopgap as industrial plans were hurriedly redrawn to include more aircraft factories and De Gaulle was forced to reallocate part of the army’s budget to the development and production of new and better fighters as soon as possible.
However, while the bombing of Lyons had come as a shock and a tragedy for the French Empire, it was nothing compared to the aerial destruction being rained down across northern France.
Ever since the defeat of the Commune and the partitioning of France, the Republican Air Force had, at the urging of the fleeing Communard leaders, began bombing major French industrial centres in order to prevent them from being of use to the Germans and their puppet French government.
As the war continued however, with the Union lacking the soldiers to attempt a landing in Europe and the Germans lacking the navy to mount a successful invasion of Britain, the war in the air became an ever increasing part of the war as it offered the only chance for the two bitter enemies to strike at each other.
The fall of the Commune had allowed the Luftwaffe to make use of airbases in northern France and, as the German determination to force the Union to seek peace increased, they mounted heavier and heavier raids on Britain, matching Messerschmitts against Spitfires as the two sides struggled for the aerial supremacy which both sides were now convinced would decide the outcome of the war.
It was not long before the round the clock bombing raids by both sides escalated from attacks on military targets to direct attacks on civilian populations. By making thousands homeless and destroying civilian morale, the aims of the new tactics used by both sides were to overwhelm their enemies with the strain of trying to maintain order in such situations.
At first the Union only targeted German and willingly allied nation’s cities. Then they extended that to airbases in northern France before extending it again to factories and then, finally, to the French civilian population. As total war waged in the air, the cities of northern France and southern England suffered immensely. And, by 1941, after two years of relentless bombing, northern France was reaching breaking point.
A bombed out suburb of Paris, Spring 1940
With industry destroyed and heavy war reparations to pay, high inflation was running rampant. Any attempts to restart the shattered French economy were drowned in the constant tide of German companies using northern France as a dumping ground for their products. Against the scratchless factories of eastern and central Germany the bombed out industrial centres of France had no hope of competing.
Additionally, as formerly state and worker owned factories were sold off in an attempt to restore capitalism to the formerly totalist state, the French found their national assets falling one after the other into foreign hands. While in theory any Frenchmen or group of them could raise the funds to buy the factories placed on the market, the worthlessness of the Franc meant that most of them were snapped up by German industrialists who used the strength of the Reichsmark to acquire them at well below their true value before promptly stripping them of equipment and shipping it to factories in Prussia beyond the range of the RAF. Pleas to the new French government to end this asset-stripping went unheeded as France’s new German King had no desire to upset his countrymen or the Kaiser.
Suffering the horrors of war and economic turmoil, thousands of Frenchmen turned in desperation to the French Empire. Despite the best efforts by the north’s new government to block the signals, radio broadcasts from the Empire continued to be heard by massive audiences in occupied France. The messages of peace and prosperity in a land run by Frenchmen rather than the hated Germans appealed to many, even to former syndicalists. And so, throughout 1940 and 1941 small, but ever increasing numbers of refugees used the Underground Railway to slip past the border guards and into the Empire. Indeed, as the border guards themselves were conscripts, many of them were quite happy to turn a blind eye to refugees crossing in exchange for bribes.
Refugees photographed just after having crossed the border into the south.
Although distracted by the challenge of keeping order in the restless and devastated city of Paris, the government of occupied France had become aware of the refugees and the fact that northern France was losing many of its workers to the south.
However, despite their concern, King Francois’ royal council, mostly composed of petty functionaries and bureaucrats, could not decide on any course of action to tackle the problem. But this changed when a group of northern France’s last industrialists, men who had managed to hold on to their wealth throughout Communard rule and who had been given factories in the first wave of privatisation, finally gave up on struggling to survive in the impossible conditions in occupied France.
On the 25th of October they and many of their most skilled workers and foremen, and their families, crossed the border into southern France having sent most of their wealth ahead of them via Switzerland and having paid the border guards to be somewhere else that day.
On their arrival in the Empire they were feted as heroes for having made the perilous journey and as living proof that only Napoleon IV offered a prosperous future for France. Additionally, they, and the many other refugees who had come before them, found swift employment in the new factories being built, providing a welcome boost to the Empire’s economy.
In northern France, however, the shock of the sudden mass defection of so many of those needed to rebuild the country was enough to galvanise the government into action. Calling in the Kaiser’s troops to replace the French border guards, they issued a new edict that anyone attempting to cross the border would be shot without trial (all civil liberties having been suspended in France since the start of the war) and began the construction of what would become known as the Occitan Wall.
Initially a formidable fence of barbed wire and watch towers, it was soon expanded, ironically providing much needed jobs, to include a reinforced concrete wall running all the way across France and guarded by thousands of soldiers.
The immediate impact of the wall was to instantly all but shut off the flow of refugees into France. The longer term impact, felt over the next few weeks and months was a deep and permanent cooling of relations between the Mitteleuropa and the Catholic League. Between the condemnations of the northern French government for its brutality by League governments on the one hand, and the praise by Mitteleuropa governments on the other, it rapidly became obvious that, while unwilling to go to war, both power blocs were now hostile towards each other.
In many ways, the erection of the Occitan Wall would serve to mark the beginning of the Cold War.