Summarize

"From: “A History of Film” by David Grayson (1988)—

Today it’s a reasonably commonly-held belief, even among first-year film students, that Societist filmmaking has always been as it is today; heavily censored and ring-fenced by ideology, yet usually not too explicit in that ideology, short on character development and long on complex action scenes and rather sappy, often shoehorned-in love stories. When students first begin to learn, they overcome this initial misconception, but replace it with a different kind of wrong – which, is to say, they progress in their education. The typical assumption early in a film student’s studies is that, rather, Societist filmmaking changed dramatically since the beginning, but that it falls neatly into three main eras. Indeed, one will see this claimed repeated even in supposedly reputable textbooks which fall victim to sacrificing accuracy on the altar of a simple narrative. These three supposed eras, none of which any actual Societist amigo or amiga would recognise(!) are usually called, firstly, the Experimental or Alfaran Period. This stretches from the invention of film to the death of Alfarus and the Konkursum ad Kultura, which had a severe effect on the arts in the Combine in general.

Some older people in the free world will remember the Societist films of the second alleged era, the Moralizdiko Period, which resulted from the purges of the Konkursum ad Kultura. These were stereotypically very dull and worthy, resembling the French, Russian and American films of a generation before,[9] heavy on droning on about doctrinaire Societism, often pausing a scene for a tangential diatribe about the Nationalistically Blinded Enemy Without (and, paranoidly hinted, Within). Conventional thinkers usually associate these dreary pieces of the filmmaker’s art with the idea that all the talented and experimental Societist filmmakers of the first era had all been purged or fled into exile, leaving the dull-headed but ideologically pure footsoldiers in their wake. According to this analysis, the Moralizdiko Period reached its peak (or trough) in the 1950s.

From the 1960s onwards, even as the Combine itself shifted from expansion to stagnation and decline, the third era came to life, the Ledus or Visdosus Period. This is the one we are still living in today, and the form of Societist film (from the Combine, that is) which is readily recognisable. In reaction against the forgettable, ideology-heavy wastes of xyloid of the Moralizdiko Period, the Ledus era featured a new generation of filmmakers. Less experimental than their purged grandfathers’ generation, they were nonetheless here to have fun and entertain the masses, not prove their loyalty to a paranoid undercover member of the Okuli. Restrained from being too daring with how they depicted their ‘perfect human’ characters, the Ledan filmmakers instead turned to epic scenery, impressive special effects using new technology, grand action scenes. Natural disasters were (and are) particularly common as settings for Societist action films, being a potential trigger for exciting scenes of violence that could not be attributed to portraying conflict between humans. Rather than stopping a scene for a dull verbal diatribe about ideology, the Ledans stop them in order to have an incongruous but enlivening song and dance number with complex choreography – particularly popular in love stories. Though often feeling rather shallow, modern Societist films remain popular enough in the free world that even Novgorod has given up trying to ban them.

So much for the standard narrative of Societist filmmaking; our first year film student completes his exams and moves on to second year, wondering what else there is to learn on this topic – surely he now knows it all? How naïve he is! Like all narratives of this type, the three eras notion is at best a crass oversimplification, and at worst an outright lie. Let us peel back another layer and draw nearer to the reality.

Real art does not fall into neat temporal categories so easily. It is, of course, true that the Konkursum ad Kultura had a drastic effect on all Combine Societist art, and then was followed by a backlash against its restrictive and paranoid doctrinaire values. But there were plenty of dull Societist propaganda films of the 1910s and 1920s that, other than being monochrome and silent, would fit easily into the Moralizdiko period. Indeed, accounts by outsiders from the free world who were familiar with the films of ‘the new Meridian regime’ (as they naïvely thought of it) often describe them in these terms, and equate their ideological rambling as comparable to the worthy political biopics of America or France and Russia’s religious morality tales. As always, the danger for any student of art is to think of the best-remembered and most-celebrated pieces of an age first, and mistakenly assume they are representative of the whole. Often the very reason why they are remembered and celebrated (now – not necessarily at the time) is precisely because they did not fit the contemporary pattern, and excited and distracted audiences at the time with their controversy.

There are many examples of the three-eras model not holding up to scrutiny; perhaps the most celebrated is that of Navis Estela, which began as a film series before also moving on to motoscopy. Originally created during the 1950s, in an age which was supposedly that of the restrictive Moralizdiko, Navis Estela cheerfully circumvented all censorship by setting itself in the future, when Earth had been united by the Societists, and star-ships were now exploring the universe and encountering other races of beings. The films sparked an ideological debate over whether it was morally acceptable or not to depict exciting scenes of conflict between the united humans and these hypothetical ultratellurians, especially when (due to limitations in makeup at the time) they were clearly played by human actors with prosthetics. Ultimately, Navis Estela helped bring down the overweening censorship of the Moralizdiko period by breaking the consensus among the ruling class (many of whom enjoyed the films as well). Of course, it was far from the only piece of art in the period to lead to the backlash against the Konkursum ad Kultura.

However, let’s instead focus on that first supposed era, the era of film when Alfarus ruled with an iron grip in the 1910s and 1920s. Students learning about this era (or the simplified version emphasising a few classics over the crowd!) are often surprised to learn that early Societist filmmaking was associated with experimentalism, in contrast to how conventional the ‘filmed plays’ of most nations (other than California) were at the time.[10] However, a moment’s thought should explain why this was the case. All other art forms had existed for years, often hundreds or thousands of years, before the Final Revolution. Societism was fundamentally based on the Tower of Babel philosophy that all humans had once shared a single culture, and that all modern expressions of culture represented degraded forms that had metallaxised [mutated] from that original perfect state. The Final Society, it was argued, should try to reconstruct the original culture – just as linguistics had reconstructed lost languages – by the comparative method, finding links between disparate cultures and emphasising these. For example, Sanchez himself had noted the parallel that the Chinese had a table of noble ranks which he equated with that of Europe.[11]

In the early Combine, therefore, there was an appointed class of scholars (who eventually became associated with the Biblioteka Mundial) concerned with trying to use these comparative methods to piece together what the Universal Human Culture should look like. Initially, this was frequently treated as a far-off, long-term project, much like the idea that Novalatina should in turn be replaced with Old Eurasian [i.e. Proto-Indo-European] when it had been sufficiently reconstructed. However, the push for cultural unification became more and more significant throughout the period of Alfarus’ rule, in part because its advocates had a tendency to get promoted and survive purges. Markus Lupus (MaKe Lopez) was a particularly strong advocate in Alfarus’ inner circle. Some areas, such as Human Music and Human Cuisine, still remained rather underdeveloped at the time of Alfarus’ death, suspected to be because Alfarus himself (and his wife) were fond of both the music and the cuisine the former UPSA had already had. Other areas, like Human Literature, Human Drama and Human Painting, saw much more work in the period, perhaps because Alfarus was less interested in those.

We can already see the divergence from the disinterested, academic pursuit to recapture some hypothetical unified human identity which Sanchez himself, and perhaps even Caraíbas and Jaimes, had envisioned. Under Alfarus, the quest for the Human Way was invariably, and inevitably, influenced by the personal beliefs of the scholars and their patrons, affected by power plays and currents of fashion. The most obvious and self-evident way in this took place was that when the scholars did publish final models for the Human Way on a particular subject, it often bore a suspicious resemblance in its core to the way the old Meridians had lived. Influences from other cultures were incorporated, and highlighted as supposedly preserving other traces of the ancestral Human Way, but always in a visibly tokenistic manner layered over the Meridian core. These smaller influences were usually drawn primarily from China (due to Lupus’ influence and China playing a big part in Sanchez’s ‘revelation’ of universality) and secondarily from the regions which the Societists currently ruled, such as central Africa and the East Indies. The situation was also confused by how the Societists of Alfarus’ period tended to promote comparisons to the Roman Empire (despite the latter’s history of war and violence) in connexion with the Novalatina language, something that would persist until a backlash against it under the Konkursum ad Kultura.

Other than Italy and Spain, the rest of Europe, by contrast, was usually dismissed as a ‘mere peninsula with delusions of grandeur’ and representing little of worth in connection with the alleged lost Universal Human Culture. This was clearly influenced by contemporary foreign policy, resentment of the French both ancestral and caused by the conflict with the IEF, dismissal of the ENA and therefore the British Isles that had spawned it, and a desire to appeal to peoples colonised by Europeans elsewhere in the world to turn to Societism. It may even have been an expression of ferdinandismo, Novamundine supremacism and contempt for the Old World. All in all, this brief rundown shows just how little the Societists’ censorship diktats had to do with any kind of truly disinterested appeal to reconstructing some Universal Human identity.

The point, for the film student, is that film was a brand new art form, developed (in a usable form) a few years after the Final Revolution and, perhaps, fundamentally associated with it (another non-local invention of the time, the quister, also became associated with Societist novelty). There was no decades- or centuries-old tradition of filmmaking in countries around the world to study and try, in theory, to plot back a unified ‘correct Human Filmmaking’ method from using the comparative method. This meant Societist filmmakers were essentially tasked with creating what Human Filmmaking should be, and as nobody could say what that was, this gave them an incongruous freedom to create. Hence the reputation of this period for experimentalism, even though (as said above) the majority of films made by Societists in this period were as dreary and worthy as those made in other parts of the world.

Nonetheless, that reputation exists for a reason. The early Societist film studios were mostly dotted around the former Buenos Aires Province, many based in the former eponymous city, Zon1Urb1, itself. However, as time went on, many began ambitiously filming on location, not only in other parts of South America, but in Africa, the East Indies, and other places under Societist sway or influence. These films were often far more interesting and exotic than the rather parochial ones of many countries (though Californian filmmakers often managed to have various parts of their diverse state double for any region of the world!) Even dry educational Societist films became sought after in film-odeons around the world for their depictions of exotic locations. Appealing to, say, an Italian audience, precisely because they saw the people of Java as so different from them and therefore interesting, was the sort of ideological contradiction that would have tied the later Combine in knots – but Alfarus and his men merely saw this as an opportunity to spread influence abroad. Some of these films were not just documentaries, but grandiloquent propaganda showing new lands and peoples gained for the Threefold Eye – compared, by some contemporary Societists as well as outsiders, to the old Roman Triumph. The difference was that the leaders who had, ahem, ‘subdued the revolt against Humanity in this Zone via a police action’ were not celebrated in the same way Roman generals had been – well, at least not officially or openly.

Reflecting the somewhat looser strictures of the period, these films typically did not shy away from openly depicting scenes of conflict between Celatores and locals, though these were often theatrically staged and censored in terms of violence just as they would have been in the nations. Possibly the most famous Societist film of that age, however, broke all the rules, both of filmmaking as seen elsewhere at the time, and of Societist censorship. Bonum Celator, “The Good Celator” – in earlier bootleg English versions, mistranslated as “The Happy Cavalier” – is the masterpiece of director Vinzendius Skopus (né Vincente Escobar). Ambitiously filmed in locations all over the Combine, from 1921 to 1923 and finally released in 1924, it was also the most expensive film ever made at the time. In many ways it is the ultimate progenitor of the ‘Societist Epic’ genre that influenced the Societist films we see today – which are louder, more ambitious and more superficially impressive, yet lack the depth and the heart of their founder.

The acting and filmmaking mastery at work in Bonum Celator sees it remain popular today, despite its apparent disadvantages; it is monochrome, lacks sound (a dubbed soundie version was made later, but received poorly) and suffers from the other limitations of the day. Nonetheless, Skopus’ directing and the performance by the lead actor, Karlus Viridus (né Carlos Verdura) elevates the film above the often wooden, starchy norms we associate with the usual film acting of this period. Viridus plays the adult Enrikus Zervus, depicted in flashback scenes by the child actor Ansharius Mardinus.[12] As many a critic has noted, Bonum Celator’s setting makes no logical sense from a chronological point of view; it depicts Enrikus fighting in the contemporary Societist conquests of Africa and the East Indies, yet implies the Combine has already existed for many years in the flashback scenes with his youthful self twenty years earlier. It remains debated whether this represents a deliberate artistic decision by Skopus to produce a hauntingly vague and timeless setting, the result of him complying with censorship orders in a piecemeal and disconnected manner, or simply the limitations of having to film the flashback scenes in the contemporary Combine.

The film opens with Enrikus fighting in Africa, then flashes back to his youth as a young boy living in an Equality of Necessity-provided basic home. He and his brother Pedrus live together with their mother, who is still grieving their deceased father but is heavily implied to be planning to remarry (another decision by the censors). The rebellious Enrikus and the more goody-two-shoes Pedrus do not get on, often getting into fights and being told off by their schoolmaster. The young Enrikus is shown committing seemingly harmless pranks in a masterfully-storyboarded montage, then going home happily to see his mother. Then the film backs up and shows us the outcomes of each prank, not just the beginning – the stone he threw to knock off a policeman’s helmet actually struck the man’s head and blinded him in one eye; he does not merely tease a cat but tortures it to death; a teacher is left permanently scarred by the glue trap Enrikus left to glue him to his chair.[13] The message, told with remarkable subtlety compared to most Societist or indeed non-Societist films of the period, is that rebellion against authority may seem harmless at first but rapidly turns to violence that ruins lives. And, indeed, when Enrikus’ mother comes home, she finds he has fought Pedrus in her absence and inflicted a possibly fatal blow on his brother, reduced to a comatose state. In floods of tears, his mother calls in the authorities.

In further flashbacks interspersed with the adult narrative, a Judikador’s court calls Enrikus an inherently damaged, violence-prone boy. He offers him a choice – exile to a distant penal island for life, or to join the Celatores, use his violent tendencies for the benefit of Humanity, and ultimately forfeit his life in the distant future. Enrikus chooses the latter, and now we know how he got here. The Africa arc of the film ends with the now repentant Enrikus losing a friend to Darfuri spears. Grieving, but telling himself he does not deserve friendship, Enrikus is posted to the other side of the world, to Java. The second arc features more scenes of action, and Enrikus and his men end up saving an attractive young Javanese princess, Anisa (played by ethnic Chinese, Peruvian-born actress Lucera Ramira). Initially rebellious, she falls in love with him as they have more adventures through the jungle, trying to seek the secured city of Batavia (Zon7Urb1).

Enrikus loses more of his men to Javanese attackers and they are trapped, managing to let Anisa escape and telling her to run. Instead of running alone, she gets help from a fresh group of Celatores led by a civilian official (heavily implied to have used death-luft on the Javanese). This sequence, which on paper could not have taken more than a few hours, is treated as a longer period in order to allow Anisa to have more dialogue with the official. He tells her of the Societist way, which Enrikus had only touched on, and she is both converted by his words and impressed by him personally.

Enrikus and his remaining men are saved. He is shocked to learn that the official is none other than his brother Pedrus, having recovered from the coma and entered this path thanks to the ‘meritocratic’ tests. This results in an agonising decision – he hears that Pedrus has convinced Anisa of the way of Sanchez, she is clearly half in love with him as well in a love triangle, and as a Celator, Enrikus is not permitted to have a family. He monologues to himself that Anisa would be cursed to bear his child regardless, tainted by the violent streak within him. Rather than force her to make a decision, he slips away and goes into the jungle to go out fighting against the Javanese, leaving Pedrus to marry Anisa in his absence. The film ends with the teary-eyed Anisa reading his final note to her and then collapsing into Pedrus’ arms, while Pedrus looks hauntingly off into the distant jungle. We get a final glimpse of a pair of eyes peering out from the trees, and a narration (via the interstitial subtitles) tells us that no-one knows if Enrikus lives or dies, but so long as the enemies of Humanity live, there will always be more like him, those who sacrifice their own lives and futures so that war can one day end.

Bonum Celator brilliantly captures the Alfarus-era exposition of Societism and irons out the apparent contradictions. It appeals to an audience on multiple levels, and despite its tragic depiction of Enrikus’ fate, reportedly resulted in a large increase in recruitment to the Celatores. Many Societist officials felt it was too daring and controversial, especially in its ‘glorifying’ depictions of battles, and tried to ban it; but this was an uphill battle, because Alfarus himself loved it. And indeed, Bonum Celator became not only one of the most popular films in film-odeons in Societist territory, but around the world. Most critics outside of the most paranoid believe it did not do a particularly good job of convincing foreign audiences of the alleged justice of the Societist way –but it did, at least, convince them that Societists could make good films...





[9] See Part #267 in Volume VII.

[Part #267: The Magic of the Silver Screen

“Gold Dolphin to White Gate...we’re watching the secure feed but it’s a bad line...Barking Barking Six wants to know about what Orpington One Two just said to Southwark Mayfair Islington...she says it almost sounded as though he was openly confirming a successful generation by Hoshea Barnun...WHAT? He can’t—”

–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel​

*

From: Motext Pages MS070A;M [retrieved 22/11/19].

Extraneous advertising has been left intact.

INVENTIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD INDEX PAGE!

...

These Motext pages will include recaps and supplementary information that we didn’t have time to cover in the Motoscope programmes. Just select the code option below for the programme you want!

MS070C The Ypologist

MS070D Asimcony

MS070E The Standard Crate

MS070F Photel

MS070G Gunpowder

MS070H The Aerodrome

MS070J The Grooveplayer

MS070K The Printing Press

MS070L The Quister

MS070M Film

MS070M Film

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As we’ve already seen many times in this series, in the modern world we are surrounded by technologies which we now take for granted as an integral part of our everyday lives, but were wondrous and world-changing advances for our ancestors. There are many technologies which have had more of an impact on how we live our lives, such as the quister, the printing press and the ypologist; but few have changed the way we perceive the world so much as film. Whereas our ancestors required supreme acting and suspension of disbelief to transport themselves from a ramshackle Tudor theatre to a world beyond their experiences, we can enter a different life every time we walk into a film-odeon and take our seats.

Where did the wonders of film originate? The story is longer than one might realise. Mankind has always been fascinated both by movement and by attempting to record impressions of the world, but it took a long time before these two obsessions could realistically be combined. Still images, or at least subjective impressions of them, have been recorded artistically for thousands of years before the rise of Asimcony meant a more objective record could be made. Yet rather less than a century separates those first tentative asimconic steps from the conversion of those dead, frozen records to captures of life and movement. It is no exaggeration to say that as soon as the first technology was developed, experimenters became obsessed with the possibilities of the second.

Yet at the same time, it is misleading to begin with asimcony alone. Even before the time of film as we know it began, the great divide between the two schools of animation, simmies and phanties as they are commonly known today, was present. Scholars continue to raucously debate the precise etymological derivation of these terms. Are simmy-films so called because they derive from aSIMcony, or because they are captured SIMULATIONS of the motion of real people and things? And are phanty-films named for the eighteenth century craze of Phantasynty,[1] or the fact that they allow more ‘fantastic’ or ‘fanciful’ imagery by animating drawings rather than asimcons?[2] Then, of course, there is the debate over which was the first true hybrid film.[3] At all stages of development, film feels like a wild idea whose time had come, and it is striking that many inventors across the world produced similar developments at the same time—rich soil for Heritage Points of Controversy and competing national narratives, of course.

All forms of animation rely on the principle of persistence of vision, the fact that the human eye (or rather the post-processing senses of the brain) can be fooled into blurring a rapid series of still images into a continuous fluid movement. Forms of this principle were observed and recorded as early as Ptolemy (ca. AD 100-170), who noted that spinning a decorated pot on a potter’s wheel caused colours to blur and rows of dots to turn into continuous lines. Many other natural philosophers throughout history built on these observations, such as the Mesopotamian Arab scholar of optics, Hassan Alhazen (ca. 965-1040).[4] However, some historiographers have argued that the very concept of deliberately blurring images together to simulate motion was not one that could have occurred to people before the rise of more accurate clocks at the end of the eighteenth century. Thinking about harnessing persistence of vision requires thinking about measuring time in fractions of a second in order to fool the eye, and until this time people rarely thought of time in units less than hours or, at most, minutes.[5] Those who propound this idea point to the fact that the animated flip-book (kinebiblio) could theoretically have been made at any point in history after the invention of paper, yet there is no evidence of its invention until the nineteenth century. Certainly, any evidence for images seemingly designed for animation from before that period is extremely thin and debatable.

Conversely, the basic concept of people gathering to watch a projected show of some kind is very old indeed, and found in very different forms in cultures around the world. Puppet shows and shadowplay developed in Europe, China and the Nusantara (though sadly only a remnant now survives of the latter’s formerly diverse theatrical traditions). A new kind of medium was developed in the seventeenth century with the invention of the magic lantern, usually attributed to the Belgian natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens.[6] Building on the development of the camera obscura (see Asimcony), the magic lantern used a concave mirror to focus light through a translucent glass slide with an image painted on it, then through a lens (or multiple lenses) that could be adjusted to project a sharp image. The magic lantern saw interest both for practical purposes (such as projecting large images of microscope slides for scientific investigations) and for entertainment. For the first century and a half of its use, this was limited by the weakness of the artificial light sources available (typically candles and oil lamps).

At the end of the eighteenth century, superior oil lamps and then electride lamps [limelights] were developed, allowing large, bright, sharp and contrasting images to be projected even for large audiences and in daylit rooms with the curtains drawn. This spurred new interest in the technology, and the magic lantern was rapidly improved. New copperplate printing processes allowing the rapid production and duplication of slides were invented. A new version of the lantern with two (or more) lamps and lenses was developed to allow the more rapid transition from one slide to the next, which was used by some entertainers to suggest a scene change. This proto-‘animation’ could either have simple black silhouetted figures drawn on the slides (arguably the precursor of some early phanty-films) or more elaborate translucent coloured images. The double lantern also allowed the invention of slow-dissolve scene transitions, which were used to transform a diorama from summer to winter, a portrait of a young man to his older self, or (in Phantasyny) to make ghostly figures appear from the mist. Some entertainers combined the concept with puppet shows or shadowplay, such as Ireland’s Patrick William O’Dowd, who projected paintings of Jacobin Wars battles with a few moving figures or ships operated by him by means of near-invisible wires. O’Dowd’s skill was such that these limited movements served to bring the otherwise static scene to life, combined with dissolving images of battlefield gunpowder smoke and a powerful narration by an actor friend. This experience is probably the closest that people of the mid-nineteenth century came to what we would consider a filmish experience.[7]

While such public projections remained (mostly) static, the concept of specifically exploiting persistence of vision rose to prominence during the Watchful Peace years. The rise of the Industrial Revolution in many countries meant that chance observers were exposed to rapidly spinning spoked wheels. It was recorded by a number of curious individuals that, when seeing such a wheel while passing behind a wrought-iron fence, optical illusions arose such as seeing the spokes seemingly frozen and/or warped into bent shapes.[8] This phenomenon inspired scientists to experiment, such as producing distorted (still) images that, when placed on a spinning wheel and viewed through a slit, would un-distort into a recognisable picture. Further improvements led to the development of the stroboscope, which could finally convert a series of still images into a fluid motion the eye could perceive.[9] Even the best stroboscopes, using mirrors rather than narrow viewing slits, were however strictly only usable by one viewer or a small number. They were therefore more usually the purchase of a wealthy family as a novelty, or shown off to small groups by travelling showmen, rather than forming the basis of mass entertainment. Stroboscopes were sometimes hand-cranked, but the tendency for variation in rotation speed led to the development of wound clockwork mechanisms (or occasionally turbine driven ones for those living in towns with civic steam).[10]

The best stroboscopes were typically manufactured in Swabia and the Bernese Republic, with their traditions of precise clockwork engineering, and these often also incorporated music-box mechanisms to accompany their animations. (Both the pictures and the music-box punch tape could be swapped out for alternatives, and many companies sold or rented entire libraries of animations and accompanying tunes). The Swabian stroboscopes were typically purchased by nobility or rich self-made industrialists due to their high price and novelty value. Meanwhile in the Empire of North America, the inventor Josiah Pritchard of Chichago developed a lower-quality but far cheaper stroboscope design in 1860, which proved popular throughout the continent and beyond. Pritchard stroboscopes were initially pirated, and (after the Seventies Thaw) built under license, in the UPSA and were distributed throughout the Hermandad. When introduced to Feng China, the technology was considered an exemplar of the alleged difference between the sophisticated, worldly coastal cities and the more old-fashioned, introverted interior; Pritchard’s designs were bought (and imitated) in the former, but stereotypically condemned as witchcraft in the latter.[11]

Stroboscopes were not solely used to animate hand-drawn or painted images. Starting in the 1860s, a fashion developed for taking multiple asimcons of a subject in motion and converting these to an image strip for use in a stroboscope.[12] Initially, this was very much a case of “caveat emptor” and an overblown description, because the asimconic technology of the time could not handle the rapid exposures needed to capture (for example) a person walking down the stairs. Instead, long exposure times were used to capture the person holding still in what the asimconist assumed resembled an actual realistic mid-step pose, then the same was repeated on the next step. The result was an animation that looks jerky and unnatural to us now, although this was less obvious at the time. The mercurial Meridian inventor and gambler Juan Quiroga accused a prominent asimconist of misleading claims, and in 1872 developed a new asimconic technique using gelatin ‘dry plates’ that would allow the suitably brief exposure times.[13]

Quiroga’s initial experiment used a huge camera with twelve lenses and plates, which he used to photograph a runner in motion (after challenging the asimconist to do the same). Quiroga’s stroboscope animation was far more natural-looking than the staged precursor, though the individual images often revealed surprising facts about human anatomy. After the asimconist was chased out of Santa Fe, Quiroga realised the potential for his hobby, and used his rapid-exposure cameras to invent the asimconic final post to settle disputed horse race results. In the process, he discovered other unexpected points about the gaits of horses. These were rapidly seized on by scientists in numerous countries, who used Quiroga’s patent (and later improved on it with a single-lens camera) in a flurry of activity for studying how different animals ran. These findings fed back into new insights into mechanisms and architecture which attempted to ape nature.[14]

The public interest in Quiroga’s findings led to a new surge of buying improved stroboscopes, but magic lantern purveyors were also beginning to combine the technologies so that the stroboscopes could project their images onto a wall. It was around this time (1882) that the Belgian inventor Eugene Janszoon first began to use xyloid film as an asimconic medium; this material, derived from the same researches that had produced the country’s Xylofortex dice-loading explosive weapon, had existed for some years but had not yet found its most famous use.[15] The development of flexible forms of xyloid, combined with Quiroga’s gelatin dry plate process, transformed asimcony. A Mexican inventor, Lucio Reyes, created a simple camera design that could be cheaply manufactured and sold to the masses for the first time. After failing to get a company going in his own country, and reluctant to work with the Meridians who had deliberately suppressed New Spanish industry, he immigrated to the ENA in 1890 and started again in the Westernesse capital of St Lewis. Reyes’ iconic Artibol camera (short for “artista de bolsillo” or “pocket artist”) changed history overnight. It is striking that our asimconic records suddenly go from stiff images of (mostly) wealthier people wearing their best clothes, to masses of much more natural images from all levels of society. Indeed, it has been argued that our historiographic perceptions of the nineteenth century have been unduly influenced by this selective reporting.[16]

We’ve gone into this very global picture of developments (while necessarily passing over many others who contributed to the rise of film) in order to explain the arbitrariness of a lot of our assumptions about the medium. The Pandoric War came at a crucial time for many areas of technological development, and likely delayed their introduction: Photel and the quister are two of the most prominent examples, though the war may also have helped propagate some technologies such as aerodromes. While much of the world was engaged in combat, those in neutral nations had more time on their hands to consider things. It is important to understand that our immediate mental association of filmmaking with California is a very arbitrary consequence of this, and would almost certainly not exist in any world where the Pandoric War had been avoided.

Archibald Vladimir Vasquez was almost the archetypal Californian of the late Long Peace era. His name reflected his mixed ancestry between the three biggest and most influential ethnic groups of the Adamantine Republic, Americans, Russians and New Spaniards respectively. He was a dynamic and often ruthless businessman, who had inherited a small fortune in gold interests from his like-minded grandfather and father, but was keen to push further beyond. He dwelt in the eccentrically-designed, rambling mansion of Aururia House in San Jose near Cometa, and had business interests that extended their tentacles throughout the globe (or so his detractors claimed). It remains unclear whether Vasquez gained or lost financially from the upheavals of the Pandoric War, given his diverse investments and interests. He would usually considered to be among the stereotypical savvy financial operators in neutral countries who profited off the war: an image which contributed towards both francophobia and anti-Semitism in many countries in the interbellum period.

However, during the conflict Vasquez became obsessed with an invention his company was working on, the brainchild of the bright Italian immigrant inventor, Roberto Burattini. Quiroga and his imitators had produced projecting stroboscopes that could display short repeating loops of images, whether derived from asimcons of real life or drawn or painted imaginary (or embellished) pictures. But what if it was possible to make a camera that could take an asimcon many times a second, utilising the xyloid film technology, and then a projector that could simply play back that film? Not in a small, limited loop, but for minutes—or even hours?

Much of the technology already existed, but improving it took long years of work—years which the Pandoric War afforded, distracting inventors in other countries. Much of the innovations were relatively prosaic, such as coming up with ways to loop and wind the film to store sufficient volumes in both camera and projector. The fact that xyloid was highly combustible also caused serious fire risks for the electride lamps; it would not be until the late 1910s that the first sufficiently bright vac-lamps became available.[17] Nonetheless, as the war ended in 1900, Vasquez and Burattini has finally produced the first true purpose-recorded simmy-films. These were relatively short, only three to five minutes long, and so typically focused on striking images in motion to emphasise their capabilities—such as images of circus sword-swallowers and fire eaters, or trains roaring past. (The latter, according to legend, caused the first audience in Las Estrellas to run out of the odeon in fright).[18] Vasquez, incidentally, was responsible for the use of the term ‘odeon’ for the venue in which films were shown, invoking the refined Greek term for theatre to suggest his new medium more resembled stage plays in length and dramatic capacity, and was not merely a crass gimmick. Of course, many early films proved to be just that. Nonetheless, ‘odeon’ eventually won out as the preferred term in most countries, though a few holdouts still prefer local variations like ‘picture-house’, ‘film theatre’ and ‘kinema’.

People and nations around the world were swift to see the potential of Vasquez’s new innovation, and despite the limitations of early film, his patent ensured that he died in 1928 a man wealthier than even his wildest dreams. Other inventors rapidly improved on the early Vasquez-Burattini designs. As capabilities improved, films lengthened from five to ten, fifteen, thirty minutes, before around 1920 the main feature began to take on the length long established by French theatrical traditions, ninety minutes. However, a recurring problem was that of lighting. Prior to the refinement and popularisation of vac-lamps, few lands had sufficiently ‘good light’ for effective filmmaking: California was well set up for this, as were some parts of the ENA and the former UPSA, but in countries like France, filmmakers often had to film abroad in places like Spain or even Morocco. Indoor scenes were also often almost impossible to film satisfactorily, even with electride lamps, and many early films depict supposedly ‘indoor’ scenes which are clearly a theatre-style set placed in an outdoor setting and filmed very close to the actors.

There was initially no sound, and the ‘Soundless Film’ has become a genre in its own right, occasionally deliberately imitated by retrophiles today. Although the grooveplayer had already been invented, it would take until after the Black Twenties before a feasible sound system was widely adopted (beyond a few novelty films). Dialogue was represented by interstitial subtitles, added simply by virtue of snipping the film and inserting frames with the text on (which allowed for them to be swapped out for different languages for multinational releases). This is also how early editing was achieved; the first films were one continuous shot, but soon directors used to theatrical scenes were editing together multiple shots. Films were also initially all black and white (asimcony itself was almost universally monochrome) and this would not change until the mid-twentieth century.

The growth of film around the world is a fascinating topic. Popular accounts (not helped by self-aggrandising Californian films about the history of film itself) tend to suggest that some countries’ filmmakers were hampered by repressive censorship. This is, however, not backed up by the evidence. Some countries with relatively liberal censorship policies, such as France, struggled simply because the money and interest for filmmaking often belonged with people and bodies that were not the best placed to make engaging films. Conversely, Russia and China are two nations which certainly had stricter censorship and political meddling than France, yet their early films generally have a more positive reputation. Even the Combine, though obviously exploiting the technology for propaganda as it did every other innovation at the time, produced some (now largely lost) apolitical historical dramas which were well received elsewhere at the time (being made available with Spanish-Novalatina bilingual dialogue).

France and America, on the other hand, are notorious in early film for what the critic Albert Edgarson later described as ‘starchy Catholic morality tales’ and ‘drearily worthy political biopics’ respectively. It has been pointed out that many early films did not survive, which has potentially given us a misleading selection. In the early, trouble-prone days of film projection, there were also many single-viewer peephole film machines competing with mass odeons, whose film libraries are also almost entirely lost and therefore their impact is usually ignored. The importance of preserving film archives is made clear by what does survive; even, for example, those American political biopics can give us valuable clues about the past. The Social American (1910) is an account of the life of the recently deceased President, Lewis Faulkner; while clearly made with partisan aims and full of veiled attacks on the Supremacist Party, it is a vital clue for reconstructing a positive narrative for Faulkner’s contemporarily perceived legacy—before he simply became the chieftain of the ‘Guilty Men’ who failed to strangle Societism in its cradle. Evidently Americans themselves became fed up of the ‘worthy’ tone of these tales by the late 1910s, as we begin to see more daring political thrillers with fictional characters, involving moral complexity and violence of a sort formerly only seen in crasser film shorts aimed at the lower classes. These would lead to a moral panic during and after the Black Twenties, despite the country having more immediate concerns on its mind.

England was a fragile country at this time, but its recent social upheaval meant that many bright young men (and women) had risen to the top, and some of these were quick to seize on the new growth of film technology. England largely lacked the outdoor light needed for effective simmy-filmmaking, but instead pioneers like Robert Beardsworth of Bradford, Yorkshire focused on combining the Vasquez-Burattini system with hand-drawn images. True phanty-films began in England, and often began as (imperfect) attempts to draw asimconically realistic animations of actors—sometimes by tracing the poor-quality, low-light camera recordings of the actors.[19] Though these films persisted for a while, they generally died a death after vac-lamps allowed the direct filming of actors. However, other filmmakers instead focused on exploiting the untrammelled landscape of imagination and possibility that phanty-films provided. Simplified, surreal and exaggerated phanty-films, both short and long, were produced in England at this time and exported worldwide—though sometimes hampered by the fact that English-language speech bubbles were sometimes drawn directly on the film rather than having interstitial text that could be switched out.[20] Though the drawing process was long and tedious, English phanty-films also had the advantage that colour became feasible much earlier (in the mid-1910s), although the complex and expensive systems used at the time meant that this was still not the norm. English techniques were copied in many other countries, and it is a measure of their success that in some of those countries a phanty-film is still simply called, for example in French, “un film anglais”.

California continued to lead the way in filmmaking, with a ‘Xyloid Rush’ emulating the gold rush of almost a century before; many would-be filmmakers moved to the Republic in order to take advantage of its light, wealthy audiences, and perhaps its liberal censorship policies. It was, perhaps, inevitable that it would also be California to introduce the first multi-national film award, the Vasquez Award (sponsored by the man himself) in 1922. Despite the Black Twenties and later conflicts, the ‘Vazzies’ have continued every year since then.

The first winner, to the surprise of many at the time, was not a Californian production but an American one. The film itself remains iconic, though many will doubtless think of its later colour and ‘soundie’ remakes. Less well known is the fact that it is actually an adaptation of a book, “Annie’s Quest” by Augusta Jane Deloitte, a New York City-based author; even less well known is that it was actually a sequel, though the preceding book, “Metamorphosis”, had not been adapted for a full-length film. Deloitte was a popular author in her day, but today she is typically remembered only in connexion with the film. “Metamorphosis” is about the courageous daughter, Annie, of a kind-hearted gambler living in New Spain in pre-Pandoric War days; when bandits attack she and a New York visitor help fight them off, but her father is slain. She discovers from the visitor, one William Cortland, that she is actually a long-lost scion of the wealthy New York Vanderhugh family; having lost all her family and connections here, she travels back with him to the city. She struggles to adapt to the upper-class lifestyle, but must revert to her frontier cunning when wealthy enemies try to cheat her out of her inheritance. The sequel, “Annie’s Quest”, sees William kidnapped and taken to newly-independent Nueva Irlanda, and it falls to Annie (despite her family’s horror) to go after him with her fish-out-of-water upper-class city friend Carolina ‘Car’ Roosevelt.

Another good trivia question is simply what the title of, not only the book, but the film itself, was. In an example of adaptation displacement that has been seen in many page to screen adaptations, the film became known by word of mouth for its most iconic line, when Annie returns from a party with Carolina to find her home broken into and William gone. For the remakes in the 1940s and 1970s, both filmmakers gave up and made that the official title: “Car, Where’s My Dude?”

Technologies have frequently fed on the upheaval caused by the wars of the twentieth century, both loud and quiet. Such is obvious in the case of those with clear military potential. Yet film also falls into that category. As people and nations compete for the best stories, the best stagecraft, the best acting—the Vazzies, and their lesser imitators elsewhere, become ever more coveted. Film has also reshaped how people have seen the world, whether innocently, or through propaganda. It is unquestionable that American public attitudes towards the Carolina Question, for example, were shifted by the release of the film “Death of a Nation” in 1918, which went on to have serious implications for the Black Twenties...























[1] This reflects an OTL horror theatre craze known as Phantasmagoria (or Phantasmagorie in its French form) which swept Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considerable time after the POD of this timeline. Whereas Phantasmagoria means ‘ghost assembly’ in Greek, Phantasynty is a worn-down form of the Greek words for ‘ghost’ and ‘encounter’. Given the limitations of the technology at the time, horror (where the viewer’s imagination fills in the gaps) seems a likely choice of topic, and many of the creators of the shows were charlatans who claimed to be running séances rather than openly admitting they were based on trickery.

[2] In other words, TTL has a division between live action films (simmies) and animated films (phanties), but the two are put on a more equal artistic level by critics in TTL and considered two branches of the same tradition. ‘Animation’ is an inclusive term in TTL which takes in live action films as well (after all, are they not effectively just animating a series of photographs/asimcons)?

[3] I.e. putting live action actors in front of an animated background, as in OTL films such as Mary Poppins or Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

[4] This is an older Latinisation from OTL; his name is today usually rendered as Hasan ibn al-Haytham.

[5] This has also been claimed by historiographers in OTL, though it is questionable given that (for example) Galileo attempted to measure the speed of light by timing his pulse as a short unit of time—unsuccessfully, but clearly the concept was there in the sixteenth century even if the technology was not.

[6] Like many history of science narratives, this tends to ignore contemporary borders and identities in favour of present-day ones (see the OTL argument over whether Copernicus was German or Polish).

[7] These innovations were also developed and used for similar purposes in OTL.

[8] This also happened in OTL, with some of the observers in question including Peter Mark Roget, Joseph Plateau and Michael Faraday.

[9] The technology described here is a generic, hindsight term in TTL for what in OTL was called, variously, a phenakistiscope, zoetrope and praxinoscope by inventors of successive improved generations of it. The term stroboscope is used for a different technology altogether in OTL.

[10] ‘Civic steam’ refers to the practice of generating steam at a central location in a town (often as the by-product of coking coal) and then supplying that steam through pipes to many houses in return for a fee. This was originally developed as a means of heating them (which is the use the technology was put to in OTL), but the greater proliferation of steam-powered technologies in TTL means that some domestic devices were designed to be plumbed into the steam supply. Though emblematic of the mid-nineteenth century period in many people’s eyes, civic steam was never as successful or universal as the later town gas and electricity supplies—in not all towns did it make economic sense to produce steam centrally, some were too decentralised, there were inefficiencies, heat losses and safety issues with the pipes, etc.

[11] ‘Witchcraft’ is presumably not the term the Chinese would use, of course, but the meaning is clear. As the author alludes to, this tendency may have been exaggerated by snobbish urban Feng or visiting European/Novamundine accounts.

[12] Referred to as ‘chronophotography’, this was also tried in OTL by Francis Herbert Wenham, but not very successfully.

[13] This was invented around the same time in OTL by Richard L. Maddox.

[14] The asimconic final post is what we would call a photo-finish. In OTL, Eadweard Muybridge famously photographed horses in motion to settle a dispute over whether all four hooves left the ground when trotting or galloping; in TTL this is more of a side discovery.

[15] Xyloid is what we would call celluloid (originally called Parkesine in OTL).

[16] Reyes’ Artibol is similar to OTL’s Kodak Brownie. In OTL it is sometimes claimed that our perception of the Victorian era as a severe and austere one is in part influenced by the fact that our photographic records of it typically depict people in their best formal attire, not smiling because they could not hold the expression for the entire exposure time if for no other reason.

[17] Vac-lamps are what we would call incandescent lightbulbs, or just electric lights more generally. The TTL name has focused on the vacuum aspect rather than the electricity, so as to avoid confusion with the pre-existing term ‘electride’ (i.e. limelight). The development of electric lighting in TTL is considerably delayed over OTL due to the delay in the discoveries made by Volta and Galvani in OTL.

[18] A similar, likely entirely legendary, story is told about the premiere of the Lumière brothers’ film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat in 1896.

[19] I.e. rotoscoping, a technique that goes back to the very dawn of filmmaking in OTL with Eadweard Muybridge.

[20] Speech bubbles were already in use for sequents (comics) in TTL, albeit sometimes combined with descriptive text below the image.]

[10] This is a bit of a simplification, as there was plenty of experimental filmmaking elsewhere as well, such as England’s phanty-films (animation) described in the aforementioned Part #267.

[11] See Part #121 in Volume III. Note that the Societists’ methods here are not completely half-baked – in OTL linguists and archaeologists have tried to reconstruct the cultures of ancient peoples without written records, looking at common words in descendant languages of the Indo-European family, or symbolic representations in Chinese characters, for example. However, the Societists take it a wee bit far...

[Part #121: Pablo Sanchez vs. The World

“Who’d have thought one man could have so much blood in him?”

–New Epigrams, Anonymous (2000)​

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From – “Great Political Figures of the Last Three Centuries” by Michael P. Lamb (1987) –

Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz (a.k.a. ‘Pablo Sanchez’), 1797-1868. Founder of the political/quasi-religious ideology Societism (q.v.) and acknowledged as one of the most significant individuals to change the course of history for not only the past three centuries, but all of human history. Attempting a full life of Sanchez is beyond the scope of this book, but see Bibliography Appendix A for some recommendations. Born in Cervera (Catalonia, then Kingdom of Spain), to Francisco José Sanchez y Rodriguez and Maria Ana Figures i Fábregas; the eldest of four children, the other three being daughters. Sanchez grew up under French occupation due to the Jacobin Wars, his father (the mayor of Cervera) collaborating with the occupiers to spare the town. When the French were driven out in 1807, the mob executed Sanchez’s father and drove his mother and sisters into exile, while the boy Pablo hid from the revenge squads and escaped. The next few years are sketchy. Sanchez was recruited as a drummer boy for a local Kleinkrieger regiment, which was folded into the regular Neapolitan army after the partition of Spain (1808). Sanchez appears to have left at the end of the war and later worked in a menial role at the University of Saragossa, then as a bank clerk in Santander (1815).[1] He joined the Portuguese East India Company in 1817...

*

From – “Pablo Sanchez as a Man” by Étienne Dubois (1978) –

Sanchez’s assignments for the PEIC were varied. For the ten years in which he served the Company, he travelled to almost every corner of the world, never setting down roots for very long in any particular place. Every region to which he visited left its mark on both the man himself and the worldview he was slowly developing. Important early on was the case of slavery. Sanchez had known little about the practice and was educated about it at firsthand while negotiating with Freedonians such as Josiah Quimbo about obtaining supplies to repair the Portuguese ship Centauro. Left thoughtful by the obvious hostility by which the Africans treated the Portuguese, as well as what he had seen of the young colony, Sanchez and his ship next found themselves in Montevideo, then in Portuguese Brazil. Sanchez witnessed the restless trade of radical ideas in the city (and may have played a small part in it himself) that foreshadowed the Brazilian War. Most importantly for himself, however, Sanchez met the Meridian trader Luis Carlos Cruz. The two men forged their lifelong friendship in a bar brawl against one or more Linnaean Racialists who had apparently not realised that Cruz was himself of mixed white and red blood.[2] Cruz was Sanchez’s introduction to the Meridians’ more egalitarian practices towards the different races, which he would not witness firsthand until some years later.

After leaving Brazil, the Centauro briefly visited Portuguese Mozambique, where Sanchez recorded that the local governors—though adamant about the superiority of the white man and his civilisation—were often cordial on a personal level with the local potentates such as the princes of the Matetwa Empire. This may have inspired Sanchez’s particular distaste for ideological hypocrisy that he expressed in later life. More generally, it also meant he observed the African natives of the Cape region and wrote extensively on how they differed from those in Freedonia and the rest of Guinea. Later, the Centauro finally reached its intended destination of Goa.

Sanchez worked as a clerk in Goa for four years, but never really settled in the city. He was always travelling, whether into the hinterland as part of the delegations sent out to the Maratha princes to check they were still obeying the Portuguese-puppet Peshwa, or over the sea to Persia as part of the alliance that even at the time came to life to take advantage of the Ottoman Time of Troubles. Sanchez played a minor role in liaising with the Persians and observing their Ottoman and Omani foes, but managed to get out before the reversals (such as the Retreat from Najaf) that led to acrimony and the decay of the alliance. In many ways Sanchez seems to have led an almost charmed life, particularly during his time with the Company: he saw rapid promotion in Goa not only thanks to deserved ability on his part, but also because of an outbreak of fever that killed several of his superiors. He made considerable sums thanks to bribes from Maratha princes and other local potentates, which (thanks to the corrupt nature of the Companies at the time) enabled him to buy himself further up the ladder. By the time he formally left Portuguese India in 1822, Sanchez was one of the PEIC’s rising stars and had obtained the honourary rank of major in the Portuguese Indian Army, despite not having any real military experience beyond observing others.

He left Goa thanks to having been offered a more prestigious post in China. The Portuguese possessed northern Formosa and, like the other European trading companies supporting the new Feng Dynasty in southern China, enjoyed considerable trade privileges in ports such as Fuzhou and Hanjing.[3] Sanchez was initially assigned in an administrative role in Formosa, but the reports from the mainland intrigued him enough that he was able to leverage himself into a move to Hanjing. There he acted as the third most senior administrator of the Portuguese ‘Hongmen’ in their Outsiders’ Villages. Sanchez at the time appears to have been noted as competent if not spectacular, though there are so many forged propaganda ‘records’ about him (positive and negative) that it is hard to pick out the truth. He observed the birth of the Gwayese creole people, half white and half Chinese,[4] and (having seen the utility of similar half-caste individuals in India) was part of the push to use the Gwayese as interpreters and administrators for the benefit of the PEIC.

Sanchez was also peripherally involved in the opium affairs at the time. He smoked opium himself a few times and wrote of its effects, of how he had realised he was becoming addictive and had forced himself to give up the habit. His diary records a gruesomely evocative early account of a sweating-withdrawal[5] at first hand, but he eventually triumphed, illustrating the man’s extraordinary willpower (which the world would come to know for good and for ill). After experiencing its deleterious effects himself, Sanchez was naturally at the forefront of preventing the PEIC and other traders from trading in opium—not simply out of fear of the Feng ultimatum like many of his contemporaries, but out of a genuinely felt moral imperative. It was Sanchez’s investigative work that played a role in the Dutch being fingered as flauting the opium ban, ultimately helping to kickstart the Popular Wars.[6] He also wrote somewhat philosophically about the effects of opium, specifically that what could leave men as empty husks enslaved by addiction could also remove pain and save lives in medicine. “One is left with the impression that nothing is truly good or evil in nature—it is simply how we choose to employ it”. Over a century later, some of these writings would be twisted by so-called Sanchezista regimes to justify some of their more abhorrent practices.

He continued to amass promotions and personal funds during his time in China—the Feng might be a new regime, but they were not entirely free from the hopeless corruption that had characterised the old Qing. A series of events took place at this time that vastly influenced his later ideological views. As a reasonably important figure in the structural relationship between European traders and the Feng administrators that was developing in the Watchful Peace (the legacy of the Phoenix Men), Sanchez naturally had to deal with his opposite numbers among the Feng. At one point he even met the Dansheng Emperor towards the end of his reign. The man who had once been Governor Wen Kejing was settling well into the imperial dignity and had already nominated one of his three sons to follow him, which he would in 1831 as the Xiaohong Emperor.

Sanchez was present for the Emperor ennobling several Feng military officers and civil administrators who had won themselves glory and praise for their actions in the ongoing Anqing Incident with the Qing remnant to the north. Also present was one of the original Phoenix Men, Michel Ouais. Ouais was still subdued over the death of his friend Dirk de Waar shortly before—it is thought that de Waar’s demise helped hasten the opium-addled downfall of the VOC in China. Ouais, who naturally spoke Chinese well, gave a running commentary to the other European traders about the complexities of the honour which the Dansheng Emperor was bestowing. He spoke of how in the ancestral Han Dynasty, there had been a system of ranks of nobility which men aspired to. Under the Tang they had become less important as the Chinese’s famed system of civil service examination for mandarins came in, but the ranks had survived ever since, and there were many among the northern Qing with such noble titles. The Feng, however, had decided that what had once been a triumph of meritocratic governance over blood and court intrigue had since run its course and become a practice of corruption and teaching trivialities. Their position was doubtless exaggerated simply by their desire for a clean break with the Qing—the Yongzheng and Daguo Emperors had reformed the Chinese civil service in their time and it was no longer as corrupt as it had been under the Kangxi Emperor. Nonetheless, until a more modern teaching system could be brought in and the civil service rebuilt from the groundwork up, the Feng took the decision to rely on a new class of nobility created by the Emperor. Hereditary titles were relatively rare in China (Ouais explained) which helped prevent some of the problems associated with nobility in Europe—titles were held only for life.

The younger traders, including Sanchez, listened in fascination as Ouais went on to list the titles that the Emperor was giving out. He would not immediately promote anyone save a national saviour to ranks as exalted as Prince or Duke (which he had given to men like Hao Jicai and Hu Kwa) but the men who had fought and intrigued to secure the Feng’s supremacy against the northerners were being granted the titles of Baron, Viscount, Count (or Earl) and Marquess. “But why would he give them European titles?” Sanchez asked, confused. Ouais laughed hollowly (the death of his friend was still weighing on him), and gently explained that the titles were just translations of the actual Chinese names, which had originally been made by the Jesuits many years ago.

Sanchez remained somewhat puzzled. “Why, then, do the noble titles correspond so exactly to ours?” he asked. “Perhaps there are some special Chinese ones that just didn’t come up this time? Or the Feng are emulating our ways?”

Ouais shook his head. “They work with us and treat us as something near equals, which is more than you can say for the Qing. But don’t go thinking that just because some of them see the importance of steam engines and oceanic navies that they want to be just like us. They want to copy the things we have so they can grow stronger, so we can never dictate to them. They are a proud people, after all, and their title system goes back thousands of years. Say rather that ours resembles theirs, young man.”

The affair left Sanchez thoughtful, and he wrote upon the subject (his own account is our main source for it) as well as musing about the Indian princes and potentates he had seen in Portuguese India, and the Persian and Ottoman nobility he had met during the intervention in the Time of Troubles. “Can there truly be such a universal template for governance that expresses itself in lands as far separated as Spain and China? Could it descend back to the dawn of humanity when all peoples were one? But what then of the radical Republics? They oppose nobility—do they then deny an essential feature of government? The French experiment certainly turned to chaos and instability, suggesting this might be true. But there are others. The UPSA, for one. I would very much like to see it again, and to meet Sr. Cruz once more...”

To a modern, well acquainted with the precepts of Societism, a natural reaction upon reading this (after shivering) would be to assume that Sanchez immediately went off in the direction of South America. But, surprisingly, Sanchez seems to have treated his experiences as nothing more than idle musings at this stage. He worked in China until 1827 and had the opportunity once more to travel farther afield—even to Yapon at one point, as the Portuguese sent a mission to spy on the situation there and how the rival Dutch were trading with the southern Yapontsi court. Sanchez himself was not one of the men to infiltrate Nagasaki (just as well for him, as four of them were caught out and executed by the local authorities) but did come ashore when they investigated Izumo Han, further up the coast. Sanchez learned that the typically fragmented state of government in Yapon at the time had worsened, and it was almost every man for himself. Prior to an earlier period of conflict in the sixteenth century (records are naturally sketchy[7]) Izumo had been one of the provinces dominated by the Mori clan, but the Mori had been crushed by the Tokugawa and Izumo left as a small independent fiefdom. Now the Mori were allied to the southern court (possessing long memories, and the north was dominated by the Tokugawa) and wished to regain control of Izumo.[8] The local Izumo ruler (Sanchez does not record his name), desperate for survival but knowing the northern court was too distant and fragmented to defend him, turned directly to the Russo-Lithuanians for help. The Portuguese spies, including Sanchez, record that a small Russian force arrived by sea to help defend the Izumo castle against the forces of the southern court, repulsing them. And, of course, afterwards a Russian ‘resident’ remained in that castle to ‘suggest’ to the Izumo prince appropriate courses of action in the future, if he wanted to retain that vital protection...

Sanchez’s last foreign visit of this period was to the Philippines. Having experienced war and drama during the Philippine War—and soon to see it again—Manila was recorded in his diary as a battered and complex but intriguing city. Sanchez wrote with some frustration of the many different languages spoken in the islands—doubtless simply venting some trouble he had had with interpreters, but this too would later be taken out of context by the regimes founded in his name. Sanchez also wrote prophetically that the war between the Portuguese-Castilians and the New Spanish had weakened the colonial regime in the Philippines and emboldened the natives, in particular the Sultan of Sulu in the south. “I suspect we have not heard the last of them.”

While in the Philippines, Sanchez became attached to a Portuguese ship commanded by Captain Sintra, the same man who had first brought him around the Cape of Good Hope to India several years ago. Sintra was down on his luck, but he had just had a stroke of good fortune at last: he had learned the location of a New Spanish treasure ship that had been travelling on its way to the Philippines (to bribe local fighters with gold) during the Philippine War, but had been sunken by Castilian forces. Naturally the Castilians had hoped to take it intact, but the sinking had been an accident. It had long been assumed the ship had gone down in the open ocean, too deep to be recovered—so had said the official report of the captain of the Castilian ship, the Argonauta. In any case the Argonauta itself had been lost with all hands not long afterwards, destroyed by the New Spanish.

Sintra, however, had found a drunkard in a bar who claimed to be the last survivor of the Argonauta, the last witness to the fate of the treasure ship Señora de Guaymas. The drunkard, named Rámon Salinas, said that the Argonauta’s captain had seen the treasure ship go down in shallow waters, but given a fake report and sworn the crew to secrecy, with the intention of returning later with hired South Seas divers to recover some of the treasure and keep it for themselves—perhaps turning pirate. Of course the Argonauta was lost soon afterwards, but Salinas had not been on board. He had been stranded on an island by the captain for reasons Salinas refused to go into, but perhaps involved the fact that the first mate’s daughter had accompanied him on board. As it was, Salinas had been rescued surprisingly quickly by a passing New Spanish ship. He had sought after the treasure himself, of course, but lacked the money and connections to launch such a trip. Until now.

Sanchez was sceptical, but was eventually convinced to take part in the plan. He used his connections with the PEIC to invent a mission to explain their absence. The Argonauta hired their divers—from the Friendly Islands,[9] coincidentally mere months before their conquest by Apehimana, Warlord of the United Mauré. Against all the odds, it turned out that Salinas had been telling the truth. The wreck of the Guaymas was found in shallow water off the Philippine coast, and with the aid of their divers, the crew of the Douro was able to reclaim between a quarter and a third of its treasure—the rest being too bulky to remove from the wreck. Despite the usual acrimony over how to split the riches, Sintra was able to hold the crew together and divide the gold equitably. Sanchez had begun the voyage moderately well-off, but now he was genuinely rich. He decided that, while his job was an interesting one that had taken him all over the world, he had a desire to get on in—no pun intended—society, and to do so he would need an education. Now he had the means to obtain one.

Like Sintra, Sanchez resigned from the PEIC and returned to Iberia. While Sintra is believed to have blown his riches on gambling and drink, Sanchez made some careful investments. Apparently foreseeing that chaos would come again to Europe (though, to be fair, that is hardly a remarkable assumption), Sanchez was careful to split his investments between the banks of many countries to ensure his riches could not be lost in a single blow. He then used his money to enrol in the University of Salamanca in Castile. He was intrigued in the fields of history, geography and linguistics after his experiences abroad, and began his studies in early 1828. Though supposedly only a student, his firsthand experience of the East—as opposed to teaching from books—meant that some of the professors deferred to him, and he found himself a reasonably important and popular figure within the faculty.

But, of course, even as he settled down, the Popular Wars were being ignited elsewhere. Sanchez became concerned by reports that the New Spanish were planning another invasion to regain the throne for Charles IV. While travelling through Castile, a country he had not seen for years, he was shocked that not all the burns and scars he saw afflicting cities were the result of the Jacobin Wars. Others had been inflicted during the abortive New Spanish attack during the Philippine War. He wrote in his diary of the misery that must have been caused by such a pointless and quixotic attempt, and feared what might come now, as it seemed Portugal was beset by enemies on all sides. There were rumours of a Christmas uprising in Madrid. Sanchez travelled there and shared his views of the pointlessness of war in a speech,[10] only to find himself faced by an angry mob who called him traitor and Portuguese-friend and threw stones at him. The mob were soon crushed by Alfonso XII’s troops, but Sanchez was nonetheless shaken by the experience. He returned to Salamanca, where some of his sympathetic colleagues advised him why he might have gone down so badly. Some suggested that it was simply because the people of Madrid did not know Sanchez as well as they did, and were already ready to hate him, regarding him as a simple Portuguese cat’s-paw. But there were others. There was a professor named Víctor Marañón, a regressivist aristocrat known to complain about the increasing number of students from bourgeois backgrounds. Of course, Sanchez was himself from a fairly bourgeois family, but Marañón seemed not to realise this. Marañón had a deep contempt for the working classes. He was an Enlightenment liberal of the patriarchalist, elitist school, the sort of man who would have supported Bernardo Tanucci a few generations before. He viewed the Jesuits with suspicion, but saved his real scorn for the man in the street. “Priest-ridden, empty-headed, he can be ordered about by any Jesuit, any churchman, anyone in a black robe! He does what he has always done, what he is told to do. Some say he should be able to vote for elected representation! I tell you, his landlord would tell him who to vote for, and then he would tell his son, and they would carry on mindlessly voting for the same family for all eternity, like a machine—like one of those Automata we keep hearing about. He’s not like you or me.” So Sanchez records his words, then adds his own addendum: “Marañón is a fool, but even a fool can sometimes stumble upon a great truth. Can it be...?”

Events followed swiftly. At the Battle of Cape St Vincent, the Castilian fleet sank the Dutch. Initially there was some jubilation in Castile at this victory against a traditional foe. But soon details began to leak out, probably aided by New Spanish agents. Public anger arose when the battle was presented (not inaccurately) as the Portuguese ordering their Castilian minions to throw themselves under a steam-carriage for them. As it was, the Portuguese had kept their own fleet safe and secured themselves against New Spanish invasion—or so they thought. But their act had nonetheless stoked resentment and hatred in Castile itself.

The First Spanish Revolution, as it was later known, began—ironically—in Salamanca itself. The Castilian government was convinced that the university town was loyal. It was relatively close to the Portuguese border and they knew of high-profile supporters of their regime such as Sanchez himself. But the students, ah, the students. Filled with big ideas and raging hormones, weathervanes for the tide of public anger...Sanchez was shocked and appalled when would-be revolutionaries seized control of university buildings in the name of Charles IV, flying the flag of New Spain. He was one of the people who tried to negotiate with them, and ended up dodging bullets. He did not write about the incident until later (thanks to the desperate situation) but seems almost to be weeping in his words: “These were young men I had worked alongside, some of whom I had even helped the professors teach! And now they spat on me and called me traitor as though they had never seen me in their lives before! Marañón was right, it had nothing to do with how well the crowd knew me. They are simple seized by a madness, a madness that makes them see their fellow man as a monster. They do not even have the excuse of prejudice about superficial differences, as I saw in my voyages, as I saw in my childhood when the mob turned on the French. They are Spaniards fighting other Spaniards for the sake of still other Spaniards. Why? WHY?”

The little revolution in Salamanca inspired other minor risings elsewhere, but these were only of the order of those seen during the Philippine War. On their own they would easily have been crushed, they would have amounted to nothing...but Portugal’s enemies had one more card to play...







[1] As noted in Part #100, the part about him being in Saragossa is based on rather unreliable sources, but is often repeated without citation, as it is in this case.

[2] I.e. a mestizo, ‘red’ being native American Indian.

[3] The new name for Canton / Guangzhou.

[4] Actually Gwayese originally meant adventurous Chinese youths who ran off with the Europeans and were disowned by their families. It was only later that it was applied to the mixed-race children that were a result of this and of traders marrying native women. The author got a bit confused. See Part #104.

[[Part #100: ___NO TITLE ENTERED___

#########said that the most dangerous men in the world are those who create great ideas. In fact I would say that the most dangerous men who, by some devilry, may reduce reality to ideas, and then persuade others that this lie is the truth...

– George Spen###########925 speech.​

*

From – “Pablo Sanchez: A New Life”, by Raoul ############# 2003) –

As I have stated (probably with little need) throughout ###### attempting to provide a historically accurate account of the life of Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz is a task that might charitably be described as ‘completely impossible’. I do not speak merely of the efforts of censorship on the part of the members of the Assembly of Sovereign Nations, whether state-mandated or otherwise, which have made it increasingly difficult to build up a picture of the father of Societism anything other than the incarnation of Lucifer the peoples of the world now regard him as. Of course, nor was Sanchez the messianic figure the Combine painted him as. He was a man. No more, no less. A good or evil man? Can the life of any man be reduced to such simple categories, particularly when one factors in what was done in his name after his death? I say not. Let us cast aside the vitriol of mainstream thought and instead attempt a humanistic analysis of the man who defined a century which dawned long after he died.

############### birthplace in Cervera, in Catalonia.[N] His father, ############# 1807 ######### collaborator and his entire family were killed by the townsfolk – save Pablo himself of course. As a ten-year-old he was recruited by a band of Spanish Kleinkriegers as a drummer boy and ###### The next years are obscure, and of course in the middle of the nineteenth century, many grey-haired frauds were ready to step forward and claim that they had been Sanchez’s good friend and taught him all he knew, to the point that the actual record – what little of it even existed in the first place, for who cared about a drummer boy in a ragged band of Kleinkriegers not even significant enough to earn a song or painting – has been covered over by layer upon layer of lies. It is known that that Kleinkrieger band was folded into a regular Aragonese regiment by the Neapolitans after the partition of Spain in 1808, but ############# and under those circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Sanchez jumped ship. A poor choice of metaphor, perhaps, given what happened next.

Sanchez next surfaces in Castile in 1815, working as a minor clerk in a bank in Santander. As a mayor’s son in Cervera he would presumably have received a good basic education, and there are vague unconfirmed reports that he expressed interest in the revolutionary ‘new science’ that the French officers he was friendly with would occasionally expound upon, but there is still a gap here: he lost his family and was pulled into a Kleinkrieger group at the age of ten. ############### without further education. There is a much less reliable (but widely believed by my predecessors as biographers) report that Sanchez had previously worked in Saragossa as an adolescent after leaving the Aragonese army, with the obvious implication that he might have learned something from the university students there he would presumably have come into contact with.[N] This is very much guesswork, however, and should not be regarded as canonical history.

####### exacerbated by the fact that Sanchez himself was always vague about his early years. Some have claimed this was an attempt to cover up a dark secret (making a pact with the Devil if you believe the Tsar’s propagandists) but I believe that it was simply an aspect of the man he was. Sanchez did not set pen to paper to write anything more profound than a ship’s inventory before he was thirty: frustratingly, there are no (genuine) contemporary diaries or personal musings of any of the events that he would later recount in his major works. And in those works they serve purely as examples, in which Sanchez himself is at best reduced to a colourless narrator who observes the incidents without becoming involved in them – which seems rather unlikely based on what we know about his character in later life. ######################## quite simply believed that he himself was of no interest, and by the time he was writing, his head was too filled with ideas, like a bubbling coffee-pot, to concern himself with clearing up his own origins.

In any case, a (slightly) more coherent record of Sanchez’s life begins with his decision to join the Portuguese East India Company in 1817 at the age of twenty. Once more, how he got from Santander to Lisbon is unclear, but he appears to have been working as a bank clerk once more before joining the Company. ############ have suggested that it was this background in finance that discouraged Sanchez from making any sort of commentary on economics in the otherwise bold and radical strokes of his later writings which sought to completely turn the world upside down (and did, if not perhaps in the way he intended). It does appear odd that at a time when the merits of the gold and silver standards were being debated and concerns over whether finance should serve the state, the rich or the people as a whole would spark some of the more minor elements of the Popular Wars, Sanchez remained silent. ############# rather black humour to suggest that his work there convinced him that there was one area, perhaps, where mankind could never come to an agreement.

##### reasons for joining the Company, though much speculated upon, have never been satisfactorily explained, and I am forced to resort to the very dull standard justification that he did it to escape the black memories of his past, his parents’ murder and the rough life he had endured with the Kleinkriegers. Whether he sought the exotic locales that he would voyage to is a more problematic question, and highlights the fact that any attempt to acquire a biographical portrait of a historical individual is usually hampered by the simplification that a man never changes throughout life. ###### indeed a reason then what happened to Sanchez might be considered an even more profound change than is already recognised, but ## unclear.

Whatever his reasons, Sanchez joined the Company and after eighteen months continuing to work in his clerical role in one of the Company offices in Lisbon, boarded the East Indiaman Centauro, bound for Goa via Brazil. What few reports from his supervisors which have not been wildly distorted by one side or the other ########## but unimaginative’. It was a time of great expansion for the Portuguese in India, with the Maratha War weakening the two great Maratha houses of Scindia and Holkar and allowing the Portuguese-backed puppet Peshwa to assert more authority over the Confederacy.[N] ########### ‘Indian Board’ was founded[N] and its early meetings would have some influence on Sanchez’s life.

It is known that the Centauro, thanks to bad weather in the Bay of Biscay, stopped in Dakar in order to purchase more canvas to repair a sail (returning to Portugal would probably have been easier, but the Centauro’s cocky captain, Fernão de Sintra, saw such an action as returning with his tail between his legs and sought an alternative that would preserve his pride. On such petty decisions does the world turn). Due to his position, Sanchez was drafted in by the ship’s quartermaster to help negotiate for the canvas needed. Sintra had hoped to obtain what he needed from Portuguese Cachau further south, ####################### Sanchez found himself negotiating with blacks from the Freedonia Colony.[N] He found that the Freedonians viewed him with deep suspicion, as they did all Spaniards and Portuguese, and after asking what by report are questions of quite child-like innocence, one of the Freedonian merchants – a man named Jonathan Quimbo – told him about the slave trade.

Some have suggested that it was at this moment that ######## but I would argue that, while the incident was obviously of great importance and quoted prominently by Sanchez in Unity Through Society, he did not truly recognise the import of it until the contrast of the later Brazilian affair. It is also worth noting that some scholars have pointed out that Sanchez may have witnessed an unusually rosy treatment of blacks ############## height of the Dahomey Revolt against the Oyo Empire, when the British Royal Africa Company was recruiting many more jagun[N] and in particular was allowing educated blacks from Freedonia to serve as officers in its army. ##### else only exaggeration.

The Centauro, equipped with new (and rather overpriced) sails, then sailed on to Brazil. In support of my point above, there is no record of Sanchez having been unusually thoughtful on this voyage, whereas the diary of Second Lieutenant Duarte Álvares (one of the most precious sources for any biographer of Sanchez) does make two mentions of him seeming ‘not himself’ on the outbound voyage to Goa afterwards. ########################## beneath our consideration.

Initially the Centauro went into port at Porto dos Casais in what was then the south of Brazil.[N] In the event the unrest there meant that Captain Sintra had to offload his cargo of manufactured goods further south, in Montevideo. ########################viduals have cited this as ‘evidence of chronological confusion’ due to the fact that King John VI would not ascend the throne of Portugal until 1821 and would not embark on his policy of “Rédea do Rei” until the year after. Such ############## that the southern provinces of Portuguese Brazil were already restless even before John abolished the Cortes in Bahia. The Cortes’ representation moderated the southerners’ distaste for the way they were disadvantaged within the Viceroyalty by high internal trade tariffs, but it was not the cure-all some have sugge##########

######uncertain whether Sanchez was influenced by the issues plaguing Porto dos Casais, but Montevideo was certainly a turning point in his life. The Centauro was stuck there for a full month while Sintra attempted hopefully to get something approaching the original price for his cargo, and while Sanchez was naturally involved in these talks with local merchants, he had plenty of time to himself to explore the city.

Montevideo ######### turning point. Contested between Spain and Portugal in the years before the Second Platinean War, the Meridians had been content to leave it in Portuguese hands. At the same time the realities of geography and trade meant that Montevideo was tied culturally and economically much closer to Buenos Aires across the River Plate than it was to Bahia, or even to Porto dos Casais. It was here that Sanchez meant a living example of those ties, the Meridian businessman Luis Carlos Cruz.

########## still at an early point in his career, but nontheless far outclassed the penniless clerk Sanchez, and thus one can only speculate on ##################################################################################################################### but in fact Cruz was there as an agent for the Priestley Tonic Company, now run by the son of José Priestley, Juan Miguel Priestley.[N] The phlogisticated water had found such a market in Brazil that it remained a valuable product even when the Jacobin Wars had torn up the trade to rich Europeans that had previously dominated Priestley’s business. However ################################################# that Cruz expressed his distaste for the institution of slavery and explained that it was illegal (though not always enforced) in the United Provinces. While Montevideo cleaved to Meridian practices in many ways and there was widespread thought within the city’s intellectual community (which had ultimately been sparked by Carvalho’s brief residency there years before[N]) it was still a part of Brazil, and slave ownership on the part of many locals was open#######################################################################despite Cruz’s admonitions, Sanchez indeed inquired of one slaveholder of his opinion of the institution and, perhaps by chance, got not an unthinking individual who took the system for granted but an intellectual who proceeded to lecture him on Linnaean Racialist theory.

The man (whose nam######rded) opined on the subject that while the Jacobins had obviously got many things wrong (such as seeking to overthrow a king), he feared that they might discredit by association the obvious truth of the Linnaean theory, and went on to list evidence for the innate superiority of the white European race, and the superiority of the Latin group within it. It was at this point that Cruz (a mestizo) punched the man out and a bar brawl erupted#########################################################################################reeing the man, Sanchez discovered what he would later write in Unity: “Education obviously makes a difference, but in raw fundamentals there was little to separate#########################uimbo who lectured me on this vile practice months earlier. Many of the slaves were dull-witted, of course, just as there are many dull-witted white men on any street who deserve their low station, or an even lower one...but many more were###########hold their own with any European philosopher.”

For now Sanchez did not share his thoughts. Perhaps it was the shared blood that meant that he and Cruz became lifelong friends, and wrote to each other even when Sanchez was far away (sadly, all of Sanchez’s letters and nearly all of Cruz’s are lost). The Centauro departed and Sanchez got a brief glimpse of the ‘vile practice’ once more in Portuguese Mozambique, and later remarked on the paradox that the local colonial governors would sometimes commit to the same kind of arguments############n Montevideo, yet would at the same time trade quite happily with the native Matetwa Empire and recognised its notables as men of rank. “It seems the humanity or lack thereof of the black African is variable dependent on ################### wryly remarked.

Then, finally, the Centauro proceeded to Goa and Sanchez spent eight largely uneventful years working for the Company in the city, slowly rising through the ranks. Twice he was brought out by senior Company men who wanted his ready command of figures to help them negotiate with Maratha notables, and Sanchez ########################## curse the brown man in private, yet recognise him as the equal of a prince in public.” It was the time of the foundation of the Indian Board and this example of co-operation between the rival European Companies also had an influ##############################such meeting he occasioned to meet Matthew Castleton, a British Company factor and amateur linguist who explained Sir Arthur Sawbridge’s theory that there was an ancestral link between Sanskrit and the ancient European languages such as Greek and Latin. Again##############cannot be discounted.

These events are studied in more detail in Chapter################## omplete our brief study of Sanchez’s early life and travels, we must finally turn to his next posting with the Company – Portguese North Formosa. It was here, and more specifically in China proper, that Sanchez would finally reach the conclusions that would one day set the world aligh

[GARBLED SOUND]

[END TRANSMISSION]]]

[5] We would say ‘going cold turkey’.

[6] This is debatable, as the discovery was mainly thanks to work by the Feng themselves rather than Europeans. The author may be naturally exaggerating Sanchez’s importance at this stage.

[7] Specifically this refers to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

[8] This is a gross oversimplification—it’s an attempted reconstruction by historians after the fact, possessing almost no primary sources, and is also tainted by being seen through the lens of prejudice that tends to look down on the Japanese.

[9] Tonga.

[10] See page quote for part #60.]

[[[Part #60: Meanwhile in the Dementia of Spain…

“We are all shaped by the experiences of our childhood…truly, if I had not witnessed the events of those dark days in my own humble way, it would not be so clear to me – as it should be to all of you – how quixotic, how wasteful, how pointless it is to spend so many lives, stain our soil with a sea of blood, merely for an idea…”

- Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz, 1828 speech in Madrid’s Plaza del Arrabal, shortly before being forced to flee from a stone-throwing mob​

*

From - “The Pyrenean War” by A.V. de la Costa (1924) :

With the surrender of Felipista Spain to the French in April 1803, the situation in the Peninsula had changed once more. The departure of the Infante Charles for the Americas, and his conniving with the Portuguese in order to give the latter free reign in Spain, lost him some of his supporters; however, pockets of Carlista sympathy remained throughout Spain, and – at least at first – the Carlistas were the natural first port of call for anyone driven to resentment by the French occupation.

In truth though, compared to their ravages in Germany, the French armies in the Peninsula were quite a light touch on the populace, save for their habit of “requisitioning” food supplies by stealing harvests. This was partly because the new generation of Republican generals active in Spain - Claude Drouet, Etienne Devilliers and Olivier Bourcier – had learned from the resentment and resistance provoked by the actions of Lascelles and his ilk, and also because Spain was a Latin country and thus not subject to most of Lisieux’s ideas of French racial supremacy. This had also been the case in Hoche’s Italian Latin Republic, though Hoche had been independent of Lisieux, until the ill-advised Jacobin attack on Rome.

The latter, which occurred shortly before the fall of Spain, provoked increased resentment against the French in conservative Catholic quarters of Spain, and the first Spanish ‘Kleinkriegers’, imitating Michael Hiedler’s resistance in Bavaria, began to appear. Rather than trying to defeat the Kleinkriegers, Drouet – who was the senior French officer and effective governor of occupied Spain – appeased their sympathisers by distancing Lisieux’s government from the action of the Jacobins, just as Lisieux himself did. Indeed Drouet went rather further than Lisieux did, openly sending his men to Catholic services (no matter that the few remaining radical deistic-atheists, after Lisieux’s purges, had to be sent there at bayonet-point) and trying to paint the French Republicans in the same light as the popular Enlightenment Spanish ministers of the last century: liberal, statist, anti-clericalist perhaps, but still Catholic.

In this he was moderately successful: although the French suffered Spanish Kleinkrieger attacks on their less well defended convoys and outposts throughout the occupation, the Spanish Kleinkriegers never found the same degree of popular support as their Italian or German counterparts, and never had the numbers or firepower to openly challenge French armies. Although Lisieux had his doubts about Drouet’s methods, the general got results and Lisieux, with his own interpretation of the value of human life, had to respect that.

Bourcier, who was commander of French forces in the west, was always the strongest proponent of war with Portugal. This was almost inevitable, as King Philip VII’s regime of course laid claim to all of Spain, including those areas currently under Portuguese occupation due to King Peter IV’s pre-emptive invasion. These consisted of Galicia, the strongpoint of Ciudad Rodrigo, and a few other towns along the border. Peter IV and his generals, the most senior of whom was Julio Vieira, saw control of the Hispano-Portuguese frontier as being based around the ‘Gates of Spain’, the two fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo in the north and Badajoz in the south. But though the (Carlista) commander of Ciudad Rodrigo had agreed to side with the Portuguese after Charles’ declaration, the general commanding the garrison of Badajoz was a different story.

This was General Mateo María Núñez y Blanco, who was from Galicia and refused to support the Portuguese after their occupation of his homeland, despite also being a Carlista. Therefore he turned Badajoz and its environs into his own personal domain. Aware of its importance as a strongpoint and fearful that Blanco might switch sides, the Portuguese tried to besiege Badajoz in the summer of 1803, but were predictably unsuccessful, just as they had been forty years earlier with British backing during the First Platinean War. Badajoz was one of the strongest fortress cities in the world, a series of overlapping bastions on the west side, the River Guadiana on the east, and the river crossing defended by Fort San Christoval. A very powerful and well-supplied army with extensive artillery and a willingness to take heavy casualties could have taken it. The Portuguese could not, and after failing to make a practicable breach in those heavy walls, gave up and retreated.

Meanwhile, King Philip VII moved his capital back from Cadiz to Madrid and, as has been mentioned elsewhere, his chief minister Saavedra was killed in the street, most probably on the orders of Drouet. Without a strong Spanish minister, the weak king became a puppet of the French. Although Drouet shared with Lisieux a love of peace and the idea that it was necessary for progress, he also appreciated Bourcier’s argument that Spain would forever seethe with resentment unless they found some enemy to unite the Spaniards against and, in so doing, forget the French. Portugal was the logical choice, given that the Portuguese had occupied Spanish land. Drouet hesitated for a while, but after an upsurge of Kleinkrieger attacks in the winter of 1803, consented.

The French drew up a plan of attack that Devilliers described as ‘French spearheads backed by Spanish shafts’, though in practice there were usually French detachments all throughout the armies to prevent desertion. Spain was hardly new to civil wars, and a hundred years earlier a French-backed king had split loyalties just as now, but rumours of Jacobin depredations like the Rape of Rome continued to inject religious and ideological reasons for soldiers to hesitate. Furthermore, most Spanish private soldiers were drawn from peasant stock, and (generally more accurate) stories about the French taking the harvest without pay, perhaps from their own families for all they knew, led to a singular lack of enthusiasm for any French-led operation among the Spanish army.

Drouet decided on a strategy which he called ‘Le Nouveau Poséidon’, inspired by the name of the three-pronged trident that had helped drive French forces deep into Austrian-allied territory in 1797. He concurred with Peter IV of Portugal about the importance of the Gates of Spain and the two southern prongs, under the command of Bourcier and Devilliers respectively, were aimed at taking Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. The northern prong’s intention was to sweep west into Galicia and then south into Portugal. After some hesitation, Drouet decided to make an ideological point by giving command of this third force to a Spanish general, Fernando Ballesteros, who had been defeated by Drouet in Catalonia the previous year. Ballesteros was a firm Felipista and a man of honour, so Drouet was satisfied with his loyalty – though, of course, he put a French watchdog, a Colonel Dominique Lenoir, in his command staff.

The 1804 campaign season thus opened with the launch of Noveau Poséidon. Peter IV concentrated his army in the north, recognising that Portugal had no real fortress city there to hold as a strongpoint. When Ballesteros’ army arrived in Galicia in April, he found the remnants of General Cuesta’s army still battling the Portuguese around Ponferrado and Valdés. Cuesta had ignored orders from Philip VII to defend Spain against the French, intent on hunting down the Carlistas – now the Infantes had departed, he fought the Portuguese, but with an army dwindling from desertion: his soldiers were even more in the dark about what was happening back in Spain than anyone else, and feared the worst.

After a force of Ballesteros’ cavalry helped save save Cuesta from being surrounded by Vieira’s armies, Ballesteros ordered Cuesta to amalgamate their forces and come under his command, as he now outranked Cuesta. However, the older man refused to recognise the promotion. Under Lenoir’s urging, then, Ballesteros first had to fight Cuesta’s remaining loyalists and kill the other general in battle at Allande in June – buying the Portuguese valuable time to regroup their forces.

Further south, Badajoz held out as defiantly against Bourcier as it had against Vieira the year before. Treachery almost struck in Blanco’s command staff, but was firmly rooted out before a plot to open the doors of the fortress to the French could succeed. Bourcier attempted to make breaches to assault, but was hampered by a lack of artillery. Recognising that French steam weapons would be of more use in the war of maneouvre in Galicia than in the sieges, Drouet had given most of his stock to Ballesteros (or, in truth, Lenoir). That Franco-Spanish army, however, soon found themselves hampered by the mountainous terrain and the uncooperativity of the steam-waggons. The machines had to be taken apart, the parts moved west, ironically, in smaller horse-drawn carts, and then reassembled by a small number of overworked French engineers. Thus in the early part of the war, the Franco-Spanish realistically lacked the advantage of the French steam technology. Although Bourcier did have some more conventional Spanish artillery, problems with shot and powder convoys being raided by Kleinkriegers – the Madrid-Badajoz road passed through several areas of Carlista sympathy – meant that the siege kept starting and stopping.

A practicable breach was finally made in October, at which point the city was beginning to starve anyway, but it was relieved by a Portuguese attack sallying from Elvas which stormed Bourcier’s siege encampment and spiked many of his precious cannon. Though Bourcier soon rallied his own forces, he recognised the siege was now unpracticable and retreated to Mérida for the winter, demonstrating his undiminished skill in generalship by defeating an opportunistic Portuguese attack along the road at Talavera in November. In the aftermath, General Blanco considered honour satisfied and reluctantly agreed to work with the Portuguese, who strengthened their position in the south of Spain by taking Huelva.

The Portuguese had less success in Ciudad Rodrigo: it was both a smaller fortress than Badajoz and Devilliers had more cannon than Bourcier. Though the city fought hard, Devilliers made two breaches as early as June and Ciudad Rodrigo was stormed, not without moderate losses on the Franco-Spanish part, on the 24th. Ironically perhaps this served to meld the French and Spanish parts of Devilliers’ army into a single fighting force, a baptism of fire, and they were always the most effective and united of all the Franco-Spanish armies. However, any further advance into Portugal was halted by the presence of the Portuguese fortress city of Almeida on the other side of the border. As Peter IV had hoped, taking the Spanish fortresses meant that the Franco-Spanish first had to retake them before then facing the original Portuguese line of defence. Devilliers tried a second siege, but was unable to take the city before winter set in, and his troops retreated to Ciudad Rodrigo.

However, after the initial slowdown caused by facing Cuesta, Ballesteros’ army in Galicia succeeded in defeating Vieira’s at Lugo and Ourense in July and October respectively. The Franco-Spanish, scenting a Portuguese defeat, pursued Vieira’s retreating army all the way to Vigo, but arrived too late: Vieira’s forces were evacuated by sea by the Portuguese Navy, saving an army from destruction. Ballesteros and Lenoir complained to Drouet, who complained to Lisieux, about the lack of any French or indeed Spanish naval presence. But Lisieux refused to unveil the new French steam fleet under construction at Toulon, Marseilles and Bordeaux until the time was right, and had requisitioned much of the Felipista Spanish sail fleet for France. For what reason, only time would tell…but in the short run, it meant the Portuguese had an advantage that, realistically, they should never have had. Soon realising the enemy’s lack of naval forces, the reckless Peter IV reacted by ordering amphibious descents on Spanish coastal cities. In one particularly filmish [cinematic] strike in February 1805, a Portuguese squadron bombarded San Sebástian in the Basque lands – which, according to Lisieux’s redrawing of the borders, were now French – landed troops and stole the contents of the city’s mint. Lisieux angrily allowed parts of the Spanish fleet, often now led by a French-dominated officer corps, to defend against the Portuguese, but the damage was done.

1805 saw Ballesteros win important victories in Galicia and northern Portugal, defeating Vieira’s rebuilt army at Ponte de Lima and threatening Oporto by June. But on all other fronts the Franco-Spanish position began to collapse. Lisieux had always seen the Spanish front as a sideshow, and now that Spain was subdued, he cared little for Portugal, seeing their naval descents as pinpricks. Portugal might be dealt with in due course, but as a minor irritation. He knew the three countries that had to be taken out if France was to have her 25 years of unmolested peace, and that had to be the top priority. Drouet was always hampered by the fact that Lisieux kept trying to withdraw French troops from Spain virtually as soon as Philip VII had surrendered. Thus 1805 saw the collapse of what had been a fairly successful operation, with the Portuguese retaking Ciudad Rodrigo and open Carlista sympathies spreading everywhere. Drouet sought to regroup Bourcier’s and Devillier’s Lisieux-stripped armies into one strong force to strike Portugal in the south and roll the country up in cooperation with Ballesteros in the north, ignoring the fortress cities and accepting the ensuing logistics problems. This strategy might, perhaps, have worked; but at this point an unexpected player entered the fray.

In October 1805, capitalising on an earlier attack on Hoche’s exiled Genoese fleet in Mataró in June, Horatio Nelson and Prince Mario Pignatelli Strongoli landed in Valencia. Nelson commanded the Neapolitan fleet, reinforced by Venetian exiles, while Pignatelli led an army that, though it had a Neapolitan core, included Tuscans and members of the Papal States’ small army. Indeed, this was the first military force for centuries that could lay claim to the name Italian…and the world wondered…

Drouet was placed in an unenviable position. Lisieux remained unconvinced that Naples was a serious threat, any more than Portugal. Some biographers believe he was taking laudanum extensively at this point, though revisionist historians have castigated this as the usual popular hatred of L’Administrateur that prevents any objective analysis. In any case, it seems that Lisieux had become convinced that all the Latin countries would naturally fall into line as soon as he had defeated France’s last serious Germanic rivals. So Drouet received no more troops: indeed, the French withdrawal barely slowed.

And Naples was a problem. It was easy enough to rouse the Spanish people against a Portuguese enemy, especially one which had invaded pre-emptively – the two countries were traditional, historical rivals. Naples was different. It had been tied to Spain for hundreds of years, minus the brief interruption between the First War of Supremacy[1] and the First War of the Polish Succession.[2] It was ruled by Charles VIII and VI, uncle of both claimant Kings of Spain. Thus when Pignatelli captured Valencia and declared that Charles VIII of Naples, and Charles VI of Sicily, was also Charles IV of Spain,[3] it was taken seriously by more people than the French had expected.

Drouet saw the Neapolitans as a bigger threat than the Portuguese, and so stripped the western front for troops to throw against Pignatelli’s army, hoping to hurl them back into the Mediterranean Sea. But though the French won a tactical victory at Albacete in February 1806, and drove the Neapolitans back, it was a strategic loss. The Neapolitans had been successful enough to rouse the countryside in their favour, with their ‘English Generals’ being exotic rather than heretical. For Horatio Nelson and Sir John Acton, like Nelson’s friend Leo Bone before them, briefly discarded their navies to serve as land commanders under Pignatelli. Tuscany also contributed General Paolo Wiesenbach, the Tuscan-born son of a Hapsburg official recruited from Austria, and though the Neapolitan-led forces remained numerically inferior to the Franco-Spanish as a whole, the continuous pressure from the Portuguese in the west meant that Drouet could not concentrate his forces.

Ballesteros was driven from northern Portugal, after briefly taking Oporto, in March 1806. With assistance from the Portuguese Navy, Vieira then took Cadiz in an amphibious descent and further increased Portuguese influence throughout Spain. Recognising that his position was melting down, Drouet withdrew his remaining armies to Madrid, holding to the Revolutionary doctrine of ‘to hold the heart is to hold the nation’, sought to recruit more Spanish levies in the face of desertion to the Portuguese and especially the Neapolitans, and appealed to Lisieux for more troops.

But even in these straits, L’Administrateur did not listen. His plans were near fruition, and he would not be distracted by such petty complaints.






[1] The War of the Spanish Succession.

[2] In OTL, just the War of the Polish Succession.

[3] In OTL, of course, he was.]]]

[12] Note the lack of a Spanish original name here, as Ansharius Mardinus was born after the shift to Novalatina names. In Spanish his name would be Oscar Martinez. For similar reasons (see next sentence) no Spanish original name is given for Enrikus Zervus, but it would be Enrique Cierva.

[13] The civil police in the Combine are technically still Celatores, but few people call them by that name because they are so obviously distinct from the “we are certainly not an army” militarised Celator force."