Excellent stuff once again. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the aristocracy reacts to all of this.
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Poorly! I finished the next entry, I just need to get to my gaming computer to get the necessary screen caps to finalize it.
Ugh, no gameplay images again. I'll try to get on that in the future. Also I'm not sure if the cultural Frenchification of the Rhineland/the Netherlands sticks so I'll put that up to you guys
The Cult of Violence and the Francfort rebellion
Henri was not the only patron of the arts in the early 17th century. Private funding from the arts, mostly originating from the aristocracy, grew sevenfold over the 1630s and 40s. But the styles funded were not the same--while Henri had himself depicted as an ancient Greek or a Roman deity in many of his portraits, the average French aristocrat would be presented as a Spanish Reconquistador, a French Crusader, or an Italian duelist. The Heroic ideal, obsessed with violence over wit and nostalgia for more ‘manly’ times, totally dominated the aristocracy’s conception of itself in the 17th century, and its conflict with the competing cultural zeitgeist of Gentilesse eventually sparked into the Frondes.
Where did the conflict start? It should be noted that there was little economic difference between the gentilhomme aristocrats and the Heroics (as they called themselves)--both were likely to be ‘new blood’ aristocrats who were either the sons or grandsons of ennobled men. Given the mass die out of the ‘old’ aristocracy on the slopes of the Alps in the 1570s, it is interesting that once the religious conflicts of the 16th century were done with, that the major conflict of the 17th century was essentially what an ‘old blood’ aristocrat acted like. While no studies have been done, there is little evidence that the Heroics were more likely to come from military families or vice versa. Thus the conflict between the Heroics and the Gentilhomme was wholly cultural (at least until the 1650s).
A jousting tournament held in Normandy in 1643. Jousting had a resurgence through the 17th century, especially the early 17th century, as the Heroic notion of the aristocracy took an increasingly violent turn. The last jousting tournament would occur in 1678, when the Duke of Normandy died in a jousting accident
There was one strong determinant of the gentilhomme/heroic divide, and that was the increasing divide between France’s countryside and her urban centers. As the urban aristocracy became drawn deeper into commercial pursuits (particularly within the Lowlands province after the creation of the Escaut Canal connected Bruge, Antwerp, and Paris), they reacted to this by taking on an aristocratic ideal which did not threaten the new commercial order which they had built, one based on high culture and refined tastes.
On the other hand, as the newly landed rural aristocracy developed independently of the new economy, they saw the gentilhomme ideal as something which directly challenged themselves and their livelihoods: by placing service to the king at the forefront and martial skills at the back, many aristocrats (especially the intellectuals the Duc de Normandie and the Duc d’Aquitaine) saw the King’s new culture as something which was ‘feminizing’ the next generation and making them into the minions (creatures) of the government.
’This decadent generation’ was a phrase used over and over in the widely popular Antoine novels from the 1640s. In the novels Antoine finds that his father had been murdered by an agent of the King, and goes through a cycle of duels and finally violent attacks on the agent’s fortress, finally exacting revenge for his father’s death. Themes of violence and the association of the use of violence with masculinity was a major theme during the early 1600s, and a dueling culture overtook the French aristocracy in this period
The cult of violence that the rural aristocracy had erected around themselves started, perhaps, in de Saint-Chamand’s downsizing of the French Army, but the idea of violence as righteous and required for adulthood became especially virulent during the half-century of peace that France experienced through the 1600s. On a personal level, the cult of violence led to the production of novel after play after opera based around characters who use violence to achieve their aims, and led to the resurgence of jousts and (more problematically) duels. Dueling took the lives of (on average) 70 noblemen a year in Paris alone, and once the Police’ de Paris was created in 1645 to investigate crimes against lowborn people as well, it was revealed that at least 600 young men were being killed in duels a year, this a huge number in a city of 400,000.
But on a political level, the Heroics expressed a wider distaste in Henri’s policies--his policy of international balancing, which kept France* at peace for 30 years while keeping to a ‘less heroic’ concept of moral greyness and ‘interests’ rather than black-and-white enemies-- was a subject of much disdain. This was combined with the low regard that the Army held within the Louvre during Henri’s reign, during a time when Prussia, Thuringia, Spain and Austria were all constantly at war, to create an image of Henri as perpetually weakening France and the French by feminizing them into ‘creatures, bureaucrats, boys who had never seen battle and who had never had a thought to themselves’. While Spaniards crusaded into the depths of Peru, while Austria fought against the Turk, while Prussia and Thuringia fought against each other and against the weaker northern German principalities, Henri engaged in diplomacy and funded the arts. In the logic of the Heroics, what sort of king was Henri, who was afraid to use his army, who had crippled his army due to his fear of real men? In comparison to the ‘Coward King’ Henri, the Heroics had created an alternate idea of France, one in which the aristocracy (in its pure form uncombined with the bureaucracy) and a temperate, non-absolutist monarch led France into a succession of wars which would purge France of her weaknesses.
To point out that maintaining the peace for 30 years required just as much courage as blindly charging into every conflict was besides the point. The idea, that Henri was a coward king who was not fit to rule, had been planted in the heads of the French aristocracy, and Henri’s actions did little to quell these thoughts. To take the most painful example, I will discuss the collapse of the French protectorates in the Rhineland, which occurred in the late 1620s.
Tilly’s conquest of the Rhineland had led to a legal problem for the French Kingdom: they could not directly administer their new lands (besides Elsass, which Louis XII had claimed for himself given that it was a part of the Duc de Lorraine’s lands which Louis XII confiscated during the French War of Religion), but all the same control of the entrances to the Rhine meant safety for the French interior. Furthermore the Rhineland was a rich area and France had a massive deficit to close. And so a compromise was made: the Rhineland states which had fought against France--the Rhenish county of the Palatinate, the city of Frankfort, the county of Baden and the bishopric of Mainz were combined into the League of the Rhine, which was ruled by French appointees (that is, Tilly) and which gave tribute to the French Kingdom.
This would be sustainable through Vigny’s reign and the 1620s: so long as Henri didn’t threaten the funds of Tilly’s army, Tilly would rule the Rhineland with an iron fist, making sure that France would gain her tribute. One might think that the Rhineland’s economy would have collapsed after three successive decades of expansive tribute being extracted from it, but the Rhineland grew explosively after the war. In the textiles alone, the amount of cloth produced and sold in Francfort trebled from 1610 to 1630. How did this happen?
The reason for the Rhineland’s growth is the same as the reason for Frankfurt’s name change--the Rhineland became the center of Huguenot emigration, rivaling the Netherlands as the main conduit of French Protestantism. And just as the Netherlands were thoroughly Frenchified over the course of the 17th century, the Rhineland was transformed, culturally, economically, and politically, into the extension of the French Kingdom into the Holy Roman Empire.
Francfort in 1625. Note that the spelling of the city’s name wasn’t a finished argument yet--this mapmaker, a Rhineland seperatist, named the city by its old name in his map
This was not a subtle colonization--France’s colonization and its effects were discusses all around Germany in the 1620s. But context is important--the context of Tilly’s governorship over the Rhineland was the same time as the Thuringian, Swedish and Prussian wars of conquest in northern Germany and Austria’s wars for hegemony over southern Germany. In this context, Henri’s declarations that France stood for the small states of Germany rang, to some degree, true--France was the only major power in Europe which wasn’t pursuing active conquest of German lands, and had in fact guaranteed the independence of much of Western and Southern Germany. But for all of this, France was still an aggressor who was illegally occupying a Holy Roman Electorate, and this point became more painful as resistance to France’s occupation grew.
It started in 1627 when the Francfort city elders moving to create a set of tariffs against French textiles and French silks. Silk had become a prestige industry in Europe, and every country on the continent was trying to foster their own silk industry via tariffs, subsidies, &c, going so far as to buy the machines and silkworms themselves. None of the counties of the League of the Rhine had been able to support any of their local industries; most of the League’s trade and foreign policy was dictated from Tilly’s castle in Mayence, as such, the city elder’s move was an act of rebellion. Tilly had faced almost a hundred such movements in his two decades as the head of the League, and he did what he had done during every other rebellious moment--he gathered his thirty thousand men and occupied Francfort, deposing the city elders and replacing them with a new group of elites.
This had been the fourth time that this had happened to the city of Francfort, each time the city elders had ‘localized’ and advocated for policies for their people rather than for France. Each time, Tilly had executed them and replaced them with his own appointees, all while occupying the city for a year to make sure that the transition went smoothly.
But the Armee de Rhine was a very different army than that which had burned the Rhineland 20 years earlier. It was now populated by either the new group of Rhenish Frenchmen or by the children of forcibly converted Huguenots. This new army, recruited from the local populace because it was made as much to protect the League as to protect French interests within the League, sympathized with their Rhenish compatriots more than their French-Catholic officers, and as the occupation of Frankfort went on, friction began to develop within the occupying army.
Guillam de Badenne, the reluctant leader of the Francfort revolt in 1629
As martial law went on, tensions within the French army became worse and worse. The complaint of Tilly’s lieutenant (Guilliam de Badenne, dauphin de Badenne) was that Tilly had developed two justice systems under his martial law--one for the French Catholic diaspora in the Francfort area, and one for Protestant and Rhenish peoples. Tilly’s response, “that the people of the Rhine must learn their place within the aegis of France” was characteristic of the man who had adopted segregated justice systems across France and in the French empire.
TIlly’s occupation had gone ‘well’ by his standards (only one hundred executions had been committed) through the summer of 1627, but by the Fall food shortages had led to conflicts across the city. The public execution of a family of Huguenots who had stolen some food to live led to a massive public outcry, and when Tilly ordered de Badenne’s brigade to attack the people, Guillam disobeyed the order, and with his 5,000 men (and 7,500 other rebellious Huguenot and German soldiers) joined with the Francfort garrison in a great rebellion for the independence of the Huguenot Rhine.
.gif/300px-1631_Frankfurt_(Oder).gif)
The Battle of Francfort was made far more difficult given that a large portion of the Rhenish Royal Artillery unit was Huguenot and rebelled along with de Badenne
Tilly was thus stuck without siege artillery against one of the most fortified city in Europe. His position was made worse by three factors. Firstly, before he rebelled, de Badenne had sent letters to the Grand Duke of Thuringia and the Duke of Brandenburg asking for assistance. Secondly, faced with the possibility of the Protestant states dominating almost all of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor Franz II had threatened to intervene against France’s illegal ambitions. Lastly, Henri himself did not support Tilly.
Both Saint Chamand and Henri II had taken the occupation of the Rhenish states at face value, avoiding any policy on the issue. On the one hand, this was because the money given by the Rhineland (amounting to 40 million livres a year) had closed France’s deficit during the 1620s. On the other hand, Tilly had kept even the idea of discussing a change in policy on the Rhineland hostage by threatening revolt if recalled or if his troops were moved from the Rhine.
But the revolt in Francfort had finally given Henri an opportunity to abolish the empire which he had seen as so against his ideals. He had thought, for a long time, that even disconnected from a formal French empire that the Rhineland would remain ‘welded directly to France’ by forces of culture and trade. He also thought that France’s occupation of German lands was hurting his ability to find allies within the Holy Roman Empire. In 1628, at the height of a crisis that seemed that it was going to drag all of Europe back into war, Henri chose to grant independence to both the League of the Rhine.
The Treaty of Alsace gave independence to the Rhenish states and allowed them to separate (Mayence declared independence from the League while Francfort maintained connections to the Ducal Palatin) so long as none of these states allied with the Kingdom of the Netherlands
The Treaty of Alsace gave independence to the Huguenot countries of the Rhine with two caveats: that the Ducal Palatin, Mayence, and Francfort were not to establish diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of the Netherland, and that the states would give one last payment to France at the end of 1628. This move, the first major foreign policy action Henri had made in his reign, was France’s first step towards reconciliation with the German states after her actions in the 40 Years War (Henri would then create alliances with Switzerland and Bavaria which would remain for a century). But it was also a huge show of weakness to the aristocrats in France. For the rest of Henri’s life, his choice to grant independence to the Rhineland would dog him in France and support him in Germany.
*As I noted before, the colonies were not at peace at all during Henri’s reign, but a relatively small number of French aristocrats were involved in French colonization
The Cult of Violence and the Francfort rebellion
Henri was not the only patron of the arts in the early 17th century. Private funding from the arts, mostly originating from the aristocracy, grew sevenfold over the 1630s and 40s. But the styles funded were not the same--while Henri had himself depicted as an ancient Greek or a Roman deity in many of his portraits, the average French aristocrat would be presented as a Spanish Reconquistador, a French Crusader, or an Italian duelist. The Heroic ideal, obsessed with violence over wit and nostalgia for more ‘manly’ times, totally dominated the aristocracy’s conception of itself in the 17th century, and its conflict with the competing cultural zeitgeist of Gentilesse eventually sparked into the Frondes.
Where did the conflict start? It should be noted that there was little economic difference between the gentilhomme aristocrats and the Heroics (as they called themselves)--both were likely to be ‘new blood’ aristocrats who were either the sons or grandsons of ennobled men. Given the mass die out of the ‘old’ aristocracy on the slopes of the Alps in the 1570s, it is interesting that once the religious conflicts of the 16th century were done with, that the major conflict of the 17th century was essentially what an ‘old blood’ aristocrat acted like. While no studies have been done, there is little evidence that the Heroics were more likely to come from military families or vice versa. Thus the conflict between the Heroics and the Gentilhomme was wholly cultural (at least until the 1650s).
A jousting tournament held in Normandy in 1643. Jousting had a resurgence through the 17th century, especially the early 17th century, as the Heroic notion of the aristocracy took an increasingly violent turn. The last jousting tournament would occur in 1678, when the Duke of Normandy died in a jousting accident
There was one strong determinant of the gentilhomme/heroic divide, and that was the increasing divide between France’s countryside and her urban centers. As the urban aristocracy became drawn deeper into commercial pursuits (particularly within the Lowlands province after the creation of the Escaut Canal connected Bruge, Antwerp, and Paris), they reacted to this by taking on an aristocratic ideal which did not threaten the new commercial order which they had built, one based on high culture and refined tastes.
On the other hand, as the newly landed rural aristocracy developed independently of the new economy, they saw the gentilhomme ideal as something which directly challenged themselves and their livelihoods: by placing service to the king at the forefront and martial skills at the back, many aristocrats (especially the intellectuals the Duc de Normandie and the Duc d’Aquitaine) saw the King’s new culture as something which was ‘feminizing’ the next generation and making them into the minions (creatures) of the government.
’This decadent generation’ was a phrase used over and over in the widely popular Antoine novels from the 1640s. In the novels Antoine finds that his father had been murdered by an agent of the King, and goes through a cycle of duels and finally violent attacks on the agent’s fortress, finally exacting revenge for his father’s death. Themes of violence and the association of the use of violence with masculinity was a major theme during the early 1600s, and a dueling culture overtook the French aristocracy in this period
The cult of violence that the rural aristocracy had erected around themselves started, perhaps, in de Saint-Chamand’s downsizing of the French Army, but the idea of violence as righteous and required for adulthood became especially virulent during the half-century of peace that France experienced through the 1600s. On a personal level, the cult of violence led to the production of novel after play after opera based around characters who use violence to achieve their aims, and led to the resurgence of jousts and (more problematically) duels. Dueling took the lives of (on average) 70 noblemen a year in Paris alone, and once the Police’ de Paris was created in 1645 to investigate crimes against lowborn people as well, it was revealed that at least 600 young men were being killed in duels a year, this a huge number in a city of 400,000.
But on a political level, the Heroics expressed a wider distaste in Henri’s policies--his policy of international balancing, which kept France* at peace for 30 years while keeping to a ‘less heroic’ concept of moral greyness and ‘interests’ rather than black-and-white enemies-- was a subject of much disdain. This was combined with the low regard that the Army held within the Louvre during Henri’s reign, during a time when Prussia, Thuringia, Spain and Austria were all constantly at war, to create an image of Henri as perpetually weakening France and the French by feminizing them into ‘creatures, bureaucrats, boys who had never seen battle and who had never had a thought to themselves’. While Spaniards crusaded into the depths of Peru, while Austria fought against the Turk, while Prussia and Thuringia fought against each other and against the weaker northern German principalities, Henri engaged in diplomacy and funded the arts. In the logic of the Heroics, what sort of king was Henri, who was afraid to use his army, who had crippled his army due to his fear of real men? In comparison to the ‘Coward King’ Henri, the Heroics had created an alternate idea of France, one in which the aristocracy (in its pure form uncombined with the bureaucracy) and a temperate, non-absolutist monarch led France into a succession of wars which would purge France of her weaknesses.
To point out that maintaining the peace for 30 years required just as much courage as blindly charging into every conflict was besides the point. The idea, that Henri was a coward king who was not fit to rule, had been planted in the heads of the French aristocracy, and Henri’s actions did little to quell these thoughts. To take the most painful example, I will discuss the collapse of the French protectorates in the Rhineland, which occurred in the late 1620s.
The Francfort Rebellion
Tilly’s conquest of the Rhineland had led to a legal problem for the French Kingdom: they could not directly administer their new lands (besides Elsass, which Louis XII had claimed for himself given that it was a part of the Duc de Lorraine’s lands which Louis XII confiscated during the French War of Religion), but all the same control of the entrances to the Rhine meant safety for the French interior. Furthermore the Rhineland was a rich area and France had a massive deficit to close. And so a compromise was made: the Rhineland states which had fought against France--the Rhenish county of the Palatinate, the city of Frankfort, the county of Baden and the bishopric of Mainz were combined into the League of the Rhine, which was ruled by French appointees (that is, Tilly) and which gave tribute to the French Kingdom.
This would be sustainable through Vigny’s reign and the 1620s: so long as Henri didn’t threaten the funds of Tilly’s army, Tilly would rule the Rhineland with an iron fist, making sure that France would gain her tribute. One might think that the Rhineland’s economy would have collapsed after three successive decades of expansive tribute being extracted from it, but the Rhineland grew explosively after the war. In the textiles alone, the amount of cloth produced and sold in Francfort trebled from 1610 to 1630. How did this happen?
The reason for the Rhineland’s growth is the same as the reason for Frankfurt’s name change--the Rhineland became the center of Huguenot emigration, rivaling the Netherlands as the main conduit of French Protestantism. And just as the Netherlands were thoroughly Frenchified over the course of the 17th century, the Rhineland was transformed, culturally, economically, and politically, into the extension of the French Kingdom into the Holy Roman Empire.
Francfort in 1625. Note that the spelling of the city’s name wasn’t a finished argument yet--this mapmaker, a Rhineland seperatist, named the city by its old name in his map
This was not a subtle colonization--France’s colonization and its effects were discusses all around Germany in the 1620s. But context is important--the context of Tilly’s governorship over the Rhineland was the same time as the Thuringian, Swedish and Prussian wars of conquest in northern Germany and Austria’s wars for hegemony over southern Germany. In this context, Henri’s declarations that France stood for the small states of Germany rang, to some degree, true--France was the only major power in Europe which wasn’t pursuing active conquest of German lands, and had in fact guaranteed the independence of much of Western and Southern Germany. But for all of this, France was still an aggressor who was illegally occupying a Holy Roman Electorate, and this point became more painful as resistance to France’s occupation grew.
It started in 1627 when the Francfort city elders moving to create a set of tariffs against French textiles and French silks. Silk had become a prestige industry in Europe, and every country on the continent was trying to foster their own silk industry via tariffs, subsidies, &c, going so far as to buy the machines and silkworms themselves. None of the counties of the League of the Rhine had been able to support any of their local industries; most of the League’s trade and foreign policy was dictated from Tilly’s castle in Mayence, as such, the city elder’s move was an act of rebellion. Tilly had faced almost a hundred such movements in his two decades as the head of the League, and he did what he had done during every other rebellious moment--he gathered his thirty thousand men and occupied Francfort, deposing the city elders and replacing them with a new group of elites.
This had been the fourth time that this had happened to the city of Francfort, each time the city elders had ‘localized’ and advocated for policies for their people rather than for France. Each time, Tilly had executed them and replaced them with his own appointees, all while occupying the city for a year to make sure that the transition went smoothly.
But the Armee de Rhine was a very different army than that which had burned the Rhineland 20 years earlier. It was now populated by either the new group of Rhenish Frenchmen or by the children of forcibly converted Huguenots. This new army, recruited from the local populace because it was made as much to protect the League as to protect French interests within the League, sympathized with their Rhenish compatriots more than their French-Catholic officers, and as the occupation of Frankfort went on, friction began to develop within the occupying army.
Guillam de Badenne, the reluctant leader of the Francfort revolt in 1629
As martial law went on, tensions within the French army became worse and worse. The complaint of Tilly’s lieutenant (Guilliam de Badenne, dauphin de Badenne) was that Tilly had developed two justice systems under his martial law--one for the French Catholic diaspora in the Francfort area, and one for Protestant and Rhenish peoples. Tilly’s response, “that the people of the Rhine must learn their place within the aegis of France” was characteristic of the man who had adopted segregated justice systems across France and in the French empire.
TIlly’s occupation had gone ‘well’ by his standards (only one hundred executions had been committed) through the summer of 1627, but by the Fall food shortages had led to conflicts across the city. The public execution of a family of Huguenots who had stolen some food to live led to a massive public outcry, and when Tilly ordered de Badenne’s brigade to attack the people, Guillam disobeyed the order, and with his 5,000 men (and 7,500 other rebellious Huguenot and German soldiers) joined with the Francfort garrison in a great rebellion for the independence of the Huguenot Rhine.
The Battle of Francfort was made far more difficult given that a large portion of the Rhenish Royal Artillery unit was Huguenot and rebelled along with de Badenne
Tilly was thus stuck without siege artillery against one of the most fortified city in Europe. His position was made worse by three factors. Firstly, before he rebelled, de Badenne had sent letters to the Grand Duke of Thuringia and the Duke of Brandenburg asking for assistance. Secondly, faced with the possibility of the Protestant states dominating almost all of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor Franz II had threatened to intervene against France’s illegal ambitions. Lastly, Henri himself did not support Tilly.
Both Saint Chamand and Henri II had taken the occupation of the Rhenish states at face value, avoiding any policy on the issue. On the one hand, this was because the money given by the Rhineland (amounting to 40 million livres a year) had closed France’s deficit during the 1620s. On the other hand, Tilly had kept even the idea of discussing a change in policy on the Rhineland hostage by threatening revolt if recalled or if his troops were moved from the Rhine.
But the revolt in Francfort had finally given Henri an opportunity to abolish the empire which he had seen as so against his ideals. He had thought, for a long time, that even disconnected from a formal French empire that the Rhineland would remain ‘welded directly to France’ by forces of culture and trade. He also thought that France’s occupation of German lands was hurting his ability to find allies within the Holy Roman Empire. In 1628, at the height of a crisis that seemed that it was going to drag all of Europe back into war, Henri chose to grant independence to both the League of the Rhine.
The Treaty of Alsace gave independence to the Rhenish states and allowed them to separate (Mayence declared independence from the League while Francfort maintained connections to the Ducal Palatin) so long as none of these states allied with the Kingdom of the Netherlands
The Treaty of Alsace gave independence to the Huguenot countries of the Rhine with two caveats: that the Ducal Palatin, Mayence, and Francfort were not to establish diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of the Netherland, and that the states would give one last payment to France at the end of 1628. This move, the first major foreign policy action Henri had made in his reign, was France’s first step towards reconciliation with the German states after her actions in the 40 Years War (Henri would then create alliances with Switzerland and Bavaria which would remain for a century). But it was also a huge show of weakness to the aristocrats in France. For the rest of Henri’s life, his choice to grant independence to the Rhineland would dog him in France and support him in Germany.
*As I noted before, the colonies were not at peace at all during Henri’s reign, but a relatively small number of French aristocrats were involved in French colonization
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Won't independent Hugenots right on Frances border be somewhat of an annoyance? Or will they be so kind as to leave you alone.
I feel the Rheinish will eventually make bonds with the Dutch, its not like optimistic Henri is going to be around forever and while the Huguenots might be an annoyance to France, France is a mortal threat to the Huguenots.
I can't recommend Frankfuck and his Christmas Momod enough. Or commend it enough. His willingness to implement all the silly things I ask him for means that, when we get to it, we're going to have a Quebec Revolution instead of a Canadian Revolution (which I have no problem with but 'Quebec' and 'Canada' are two totally different ideas and I feel disgusted when I release a French colony only to have its flag have the union jack on it)
Ok, it took me a while but I've caught up. As detailed and well designed as I remembered. And now that MM has a beta version for DW, I might actually get to try it out!
Also- hope you're enjoying Arlington, I just got out and am ok never seeing it again
Also- hope you're enjoying Arlington, I just got out and am ok never seeing it again
In fact Merrick's, Canada is the first name of what is know as Quebec now and the name of a free colony would probably been that or New France. Just with another flag
Thank you for the compliment! And yeah, given my interest in foreign policy and my partner's interest in arts policy/museums, we're probably going to live in the center of American rentism for a good portion of our lives.
Funny story: as someone who is originally a New Yorker I always thought that New York should never have stopped being the nations capitol. Recently two friends of mine (one in DC, one in NYC) started dating people who recently came into those cities. The one in New York is a finance banker who can't stop talking about stocks, the one in DC is in State and loves obsessing over 'power' and different kinds of power. After having experienced these people, I've come to realize that a city that has both of these kinds of people coming in would be a horrible city.
My issue is mainly with the flag and that the Canada tag has a totally different set of national ideas that LoF's Quebec would have
Also ugh that gross orange color
You're darn right about that. Can you imagine the smugness of people who believe that they were not only the center of the financial world, but the free one as well?
Jesus god and can you imagine the rentism in a city filled with ambitious people wanting power and ambitious people wanting money?
Also, living in the center of American capitolism (it's my phrase and only half-joking) while writing this AAR has made me realize the huge number of similarities between Ancien Regime France and the modern day. But I try to keep my Marxist/Syndicalist/Jacobin analysis to myself (or I will until we get up to the 18th century HAHA)
An interesting turn of events
I wonder if it hadn't been for Tilly's intransigence if the Henri wouldn't have more willing to unleash the dogs of war?
Or maybe not.
I wonder if it hadn't been for Tilly's intransigence if the Henri wouldn't have more willing to unleash the dogs of war?
Or maybe not.
Henri is all about achieving a peaceful Europe via the balance of power. The Rhineland situation put Henri in a place where he had to either accept a loss or throw Europe back into war. Furthermore I should've focused on this more but the occupation of the Rhine was an albacore that Frances rivals had thrown on her for the past several decades (aka my relations with the hre were horrible after vassalizing two electors, and your relations with the hre determines how the electors view you. It was impossible forms to pursue good relations with any major German state unless I accepted the liberation of the Palatine) and that was something Henri wanted to drop if it let him pursue alliances with Brandenburg, Bavaria, Munster etc
Yes.
So here's the map of the French language promised a couple entries ago:
In it, light blue indicates a 51+/49- split (and light green indicates a 51+/49- split among the nobility, though in Modena Italian is still a very strong language, but nearly all of the aristocrats are French-second-language)
And because I was so slow on that, here's a gift:
Note that Gaston isn't king just in case you're wondering, he's just a brigadier commander/colonel of three battalions in Gascony given the job of making sure the Gascon nobility is kept under control. I'll explain the French army's command structure when I get to the 1650s (there's a lot between then and now), but to make things short given the appointed nature of higher command positions, colonel is the highest Gaston could expect to get to so long as there is no need for competent commanders. Also I found out that the size of a French battalion was 800 at this point so that explains the weird numbers (let's just say that the Armee de Bretons is larger due to a larger proportion of officers or something, not me messing up <.<). Also the combination of garrison commands and standing army commands is pretty much the only important reform that Henri enacts as king, I leaned strongly towards defensive during this period.
So, the English have so far staved off their Francophileness. And honestly, given Brittany's history of troubles upon and after its entrance into the French State, its not outside the realm of the believable that it would lead to a little less uniform approach to the military operations there.
True true, it's just a bit obnoxious because the reform of the French battalion structure was going to be a thing that Gaston did in his time in Gascony...but yes, even though England and France are going to be closer than their were in OTT, the English will still be highly suspicious of the French aesthetic. Lord Chesterfield, I am sorry, will be an outcast in our timeline as well.
Also, on my "how different are modern times from ancien regime France" radar, this (rather long) article about the politics of Silicon Valley includes this painfully unselfaware entry:
Here's the article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all
Here's the article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all