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"From: “History of the Twentieth Century” edited by K. D. Saunders (2001)—

Here in our precious homeland, we always see the twentieth century as providing the backdrop for our great national trauma. Some may say we deserved everything we got for our legacy of exploitation and prejudice, yet others would argue that we learned only that some things are worse than division.

But, though we must always be careful to keep our national perspective and hold on to our fragile identity, we must remember that there is more to the twentieth century than that. Mother Carolina is not unique in seeing that century as a theatre of trauma and distress, even if her people suffered more than most. The pieces did not move on the world chessboard out of some narrative desire to ruin our lives, but as the consequences of natural events and choices made by men. And women, for in this century women began to take their place as equals on the world stage.

Both we and our estranged brethren in the ENA have a tendency to place ourselves at the centre of the conflicts that ravaged the world in that century, whether through war, disease or cultural devastation. But we cannot truly understand them unless we look at events in the wider world. Though much of this book is devoted to our own struggles, we must look beyond to find the causes of the Black Twenties.

The end of the Pandoric War had produced both winners and losers. As we will cover in great detail elsewhere, Carolina was certainly one of the latter, though her people could not have dreamed that far worse than indecisive American occupation was yet to come.

The fates of many nations were ambiguous. China had emerged victorious on all fronts, the atavistic Beiqing remnant destroyed and a reunited empire ready to exert itself on the world stage—yet the new Huifu Emperor spent much of the First Interbellum Period resolving the country’s internal contradictions and recovering from disasters, little dreaming that they would soon be overshadowed by worse. The ENA might have been victorious over Carolina and subordinates half of old New Spain, but she had seen reversals against the Russians in the North West and had finally lost the mother country of Britain to revolt and revolution. Emperor George IV had abdicated in favour of his son Augustus, and though the Social American programmes of President Faulkner would change the American people’s quality of life, it was hard to see America as a victorious nation. Germany, Danubia, the Ottoman Empire and Belgium had all been weakened by the conflict. Russia, despite her reversals in China, seemed otherwise the clearest victor of the conflict, with wins against both the ENA and the German-Danubian Pressburg Pact. Yet it was France, who had led the Marseilles Protocol alliance of armed neutrality, that emerged as the world’s premier power without becoming directly involved in the war. Even her old enemy of Britain was now part of her alliance. Grumblings of her policy being that of a ‘vulture’ aside, with her rivals weakened it seemed as though the twentieth century might be a French century.

Yet as every schoolchild knows, it was a paper victory. Only a handful of years later, France’s pre-eminence would be threatened by her failed intervention in South America. The UPSA had seemed the most definitive loser of the war, and in any meaningful sense she had been; yet though the nation was murdered, its people went on, like a shambling zambee corpse bereft of a soul. The Alfarus regime brutally but effectively led the new Societist Combine to drive France from the shores of the former UPSA, unite a continent under the black flag and the Threefold Eye, and then spread its destructive message to distant shores. Yet, throughout the First Interbellum, few recognised the threat that the seductive message of Sanchezism represented, or the cultural self-harm that former Meridians were suffering in their alphanumerically redesignated homeland. Instead, nations turned inwards and revelled in peace and prosperity, with the rise of the Flippant movement; politics was neglected, as we know all too well from the endless debates over our own occupied country’s fate which went nowhere.

Such Flippant debauchery was brought to a rude end by the Panic of 1917 and the ensuing global financial collapse. The five years between the Panic and the start of the open conflict phase of the Black Twenties are crucial for drawing up the battle lines. France and Russia, as the two most financially stable powers of the Old World, had built new alliances and reinforced old ones by means of bailing out the less fortunate nations. Sometimes those alliances might be firm, as in the longstanding attachment of successive francophile Italian governments to Paris, or the brutal suppression of Belgian protests by Russian troops in 1918 which rendered Charles Theodore III as nothing more than a puppet of Petrograd. Others were considerably shakier. The French governments of Mercier (m), Rouillard and ultimately Cazeneuve attempted to build an alliance aimed at containing Russian expansion. This is sometimes described as the ‘Bouclier’ (shield), but in truth this was a propaganda term only applied to alliances in Europe, in particular those with Germany; as Marshal Picotin observed, the shielding in question was between France proper and the hypothetical hordes of lightning-fast Russian armarts. A more general term thrown around in theoretical French foreign policy circles was Cannes Mondiale or ‘Worldwide Cannae’, drawing comparisons with Hannibal of Carthage’s successful victory in surrounding and annihilating a Roman army at the titular battle. Similarly, France sought to surround Russia, though the second part of the Cannae comparison only lent weight to Russian propaganda which portrayed the French as aggressors bent on world domination, that Russian culture and freedom was under threat.[3]

The idea of an inevitable confrontation between France and Russia, in modern renditions of history tinged with hindsight, is frequently influenced by the 1919 publication The Dream of Rome by the rakish Bavarian academic Hubert de Pfeffel. De Pfeffel created a historiographic vision of European history since the first separation of the unitary Roman Empire, in which he argued that the final heirs to the Emperors of the West and East were the Kingdom of France and the Empire of All Russias. Like a number of European historians of the period, he was undoubtedly influenced by an influx of Chinese writings as China slightly opened up further towards Europe and the Novamund; many Chinese scholars had suggested a comparable model in that China might go through long periods of division, but would always inevitably reunite into a single empire as its natural and default state. De Pfeffel traced descent from Charlemagne being crowned Emperor of the West by Pope Leo III in 800 AD, then dismissed the derivative Holy Roman Empire as a dead-end of history, arguing that French history represented a truer descent from the Roman past. He pointed out that the Romans themselves had frequently passed down the imperium via adopted sons rather than blood descent, arguing that actions—such as the successful unification of France and her growing influence on surrounding nations like a new Carolingian empire—spoke louder than the mere legalities of direct descent. Russia was far easier to fit into his model, as the Tsars had openly claimed the succession of Byzantium (the Empire of the East) since the fifteenth century, and proclaimed Russia as the Third Rome.

De Pfeffel’s argument, doubtless influenced by the Chinese scholars, was that Europe had slowly but steadily travelled a path back from division to an Empire of the West and an Empire of the East, led by two nations that had never strictly fought a war. Now the two blocs would clash to decide who would be the last victorious Caesar, uniting Europe under the rule of either Paris or Petrograd. He even envisaged a future in which that victor would eventually move the capital back to Rome, and the more than a millennium of division would be seen as a mere passing crisis, a blip in the history of the eternal Rome. Colourful and imaginative though de Pfeffel’s vision was, it had very little to do with French or Russian foreign policy at the time. A moment’s reflection should make it obvious that, quite apart from anything else, it came far too late to possibly influence anything significant. Rather, de Pfeffel was himself reflecting ongoing events and attempting to fit them to his theory. If any grand geopolitical theory can be said to have influenced French foreign policy, it is instead Hendrik Wiegel’s Crossroads of History in 1907, in which he portrayed any power that possessed the ‘Core’ of the Old World would eventually grow to dominate it.[4]

Ultimately, the Cannae Mondiale suffered from the sheer number of nations on the frontiers of Russia (or the Vitebsk Union) and France having varying levels of relations with those neighbours. France’s firmest alliances, like those with Italy, were also the ones least relevant to such frontiers (likely not a coincidence, as powers like Danubia had little incentive to invite a new conflict). While firm alliances grew with Scandinavia and Persia, that with Germany proved shakier than expected, and bad blood over Algiers continued to undermine French approaches to the Ottoman Empire. India remained too debatable a region, with de jure control often bearing no resemblance to the lines on a map; the Russian control of Pendzhab [Punjab] had already caught many observers offguard. A real coup of French foreign policy did come with the Treaty of Bermuda in 1920, signed by the Cazeneuve government but based on negotiations by the Tuilleries under Rouillard, which led to rapproachment between Paris and Fredericksburg. As well as defusing tensions over the British Isles, this ensured that the two great powers would face their mutual enemy of Russia in a coordinated fashion.

But the keystone of French policy, building over years and even before the Panic of 1917, was China. Feng China had proved it could beat the Russians during the Pandoric War, even as most other fronts had given way before them. And the Russians still sat on large territories claimed by Hanjing, whether lands they had persuaded away from their Beiqing puppet or pre-emptively occupied when that puppet had finally been disposed of by the Feng invasion. Impressed French and allied observers noted that China’s successes had come in part because her soldiers had already knocked Siam out of that war, albeit at the cost of great loss of life. The Siamese had lost much of Tonkin to the Chinese in the war, and the French were concerned that Ayutthaya[5] would forge an alliance with Petrograd for a concerted attack on China to get it back. From France’s perspective, the top priority was to give China a clear run at Russia’s Far Eastern possessions without the distraction of a Siamese revanche. To that end, the Tuilleries focused on attempting to force a lasting peaceful settlement, resulting in the Treaty of Guiling in 1919 which normalised Sino-Siamese relations with some border adjustments.[6] This certainly puts the lie to those who claim that conflicts based on national self-interest are inevitable and that they cannot be peacefully resolved without committing cultural suicide!

This, then, was France’s imperfect Cannae Mondiale, further punctured by Belgium’s new ‘alliance’ with Russia and both nations being able to base forces around the world in their colonies. By the start of the 1920s, a Franco-Russian war was widely seen as inevitable, but the precise casus belli was less clear. Indeed, it could have occurred in India or Africa. But instead, it came in a place closer to home for Russia, a place which many Russians saw as their country’s natural sphere of influence. If the Tartar peoples were revolting against the Vitebsk Union, clearly it could only be the result of interference by the nefarious French and their lickspittle allies. Uprisings were triggered by the ‘Azrat Incident’ of an attack on a Russian armart convoy using traded German Firefist weapons, followed by the assassination of the Governor-General in Samarkand. The Russians issued an ultimatum, not only against the revolting khanates but against Khiva, recognised as part of the Persian sphere of influence. There was a brief period of hesitation at the Tuilleries, in which Cazeneuve considered merely providing the Persians with more modern French aerocraft (and perhaps pilots) to counter Russian terror raids on Khiva, but he decided further escalation was necessary.

Even as French Vultur dromes shot down Russian bombers over Khiva, French diplomats were at work around the world, calling in their favours, coordinating with the equally war-ready President Fouracre in America, and, of course, the government of China...



[3] It’s not brought up here, but the reason why the French don’t go for ‘disease containment’ analogies like cordon sanitaire is that they are regarded as having been discredited by the failure of the anti-German unification ‘Isolationsgebiet’ in the mid-nineteenth century.

[4] See Part #261 in Volume VII; this is similar to the ‘World Island’ theory of OTL.

[5] Used here to mean Ayutthaya the city, the capital of the Siamese Empire, i.e. in a metonymic sense like ‘Paris’ or ‘Petrograd’.

[6] More details in Part #275 in Volume VII."