If anybody's wondering what OTL's Napoleon III is doing ITTL, I promise I'll get to him in a future update.
France
France is prospering as much as the U.K. Even the tailors have survived—the good ones, anyway. Thanks to the Thimmonier machine, they can take on more of the customers who want to show off their wealth with a genuine tailored suit or dress made from American cotton, Egyptian cotton, or Korean silk (the finest silk in the world—just ask the Koreans).
Having tried his hand at real war and found he wasn’t half bad at it, Napoleon II has returned to Paris to get about the business of governing, make sure he hasn’t been sidelined politically, and make some more babies with his beautiful bride. Which is as good an excuse as any to talk about his sex life.
That’s going to be harder than it sounds. We need to start with Napoleon’s marriage to the late Adélaïde-Louise Davout. When they were wed, he was eighteen, she had only just turned fourteen, and neither of them had been given a lot of choice. It was very much a marriage of state, designed to bring about an heir as quickly as possible and strengthen the Bonaparte dynasty’s national credentials, not to mention the position of men like Davout who had made good in the new France. But while Napoleon wasn’t strongly attracted to his wife, he did grow to care very much for her… just in time to lose her to childbed fever. He mourned her for well over a year, and he did partly blame himself and the people who pushed them together, even though they tried to explain to him that this sort of tragedy was always a calculated risk.
This convinced Napoleon never to put his boner part in anything that was still in mid-puberty. After a few brief affairs, he met the fiery young Eléonore Juillet-Lorrain du Motier de la Fayette, with whom he had an even bigger age gap, but who was at least full-grown. More to the point, while poor little Adélaïde-Louise had been completely overawed by him, Eléonore was bold and radical enough to treat him as an equal. He was surprised at how much this turned him on.
But then it came time to choose an actual queen, and this time Napoleon wanted a foreign noblewoman, to prove that the Bonaparte line was one European dynasty among many, and as good as any other. There wasn’t an actual bride show, but there was a tour of Italy which happened to include the Diocese of Rome. There he met Donna Ippolita, younger daughter[1] of the elderly Don Lorenzo dei Principi Ruspoli[2], surviving uncle of the actually-important Princes Ruspoli.
In Ippolita, Napoleon found exactly what he was looking for—someone young but not too young, attractive[3], educated, cultured[4], and pious yet comfortable with modernity. It wasn’t love at first sight, but he knew from experience that love can grow in a marriage formed for other purposes. And she, tired of being the baby of the family and more ambitious than anyone realized (even herself) was quite happy to accept his proposal.
That’s the thing. She
wanted to be empress, she’s
glad he chose her, and she even gets along well with nine-year-old Princess Adelaide. Most of all, she
wants to do all the duties of the empress and do them well, including giving birth to the next Napoleon and keeping this one happy. She goes to his bed willingly, with full agency, meeting every possible definition of consent that anyone could ever codify. She just… isn’t horny. At all.
And no matter how hard she tries to fake it, Napoleon can tell. Most people would look at either the dashing young emperor, the lovely young Empress Hippolyte (as she is now known), or possibly both, say “You have to have sex with
that? You poor thing,” and insert a picture of a tardigrade playing the violin. But the key words there are “have to,” and those words apply equally to both of them. There are men in this world who’d be more than satisfied to have a beautiful woman lying back and thinking of the Franco-Italian alliance, but thanks to Eléonore, Napoleon knows what it is to actually be desired and delighted in.
He’s not angry at Hippolyte. Although this world is a long way from a proper understanding of asexuality, the priest he’s talked to has told him that his wife’s lack of carnal appetite is a sign that she is a virtuous woman. But he’s never known virtue to be so depressing.[5] That’s why he’s started sneaking off to see Eléonore on the side.
The Emperor isn’t the only French political figure feeling profoundly unsatisfied. After 17 years, Jacques-Charles Dupont de l’Eure is
still president of the Chamber of Peers. Some of the Liberal Party’s brightest and most ambitious people are leaving to join the opposition, not so much out of conviction as because hope for advancement basically involves waiting for people not much older than themselves to retire.
One of these people is François Guizot, the new leader of the Conservative Party, under whom the party is hard at work reinventing itself for the 1840s. He’s quite clear—complaining about freethinkers, immigrants, Jews, and women working outside the home does get you a certain number of votes. It doesn’t get you a majority, and a majority is what the Party needs. Best to concentrate on bread-and-butter issues and bringing prosperity to all parts of France, not just the capital and the other big cities. Above all, royalists and crypto-royalists are not to be tolerated. They are to be ratted out without shame and exiled to North Africa. (Jacobins who let themselves get provocateured into plots to overthrow the government get an arguably worse deal—exile to the Desolation Islands[6].)
And yet… it sounds cool to say “you can’t kill an idea” until it’s an idea you really want to see the last of. But French royalism survived the Revolution, the Terror, the Directory, Napoleon, and the Constitution. When Louis XVIII died in Marseille from bad weather and worse medical care, they thought it surely had to be dead… and then the ’29 rebellion happened. That rebellion was crushed, and the authorities thought, “Okay,
now it’s dead.”
And in many places—Paris, Anvers, Lyon, Strasbourg—they’re right. In Paris, a young philosophy student from
le pouce mayençais named Johann Feuerbach was deeply shaken when he heard that a homeless beggar of his acquaintance had frozen to death in an alley one cold night last week. Feuerbach—who is personally feeling guilty about not having made an effort to keep track of the poor man on that night—sees this as a sign of profound societal failure on the part of modern France. A man died because in a city of 1.4 million[7], many of them with hot food and warm beds to spare, no one saw it as their job (much less their duty) to save him. If that can happen, modern liberal society must be missing something crucial. But if you asked him if the
ancien régime could have done a better job of protecting such people, he’d tell you the Bourbons were famous for failing in precisely this area. He’s no royalist. He’s… something else. The old dynasty just happens to be something he agrees with his peers on.
And yet, if you walk down a back alley in Marseille, Toulouse, or Bordeaux, or a smaller town in the Vendée or Poitou, you stand a chance of seeing a royalist message scrawled on a wall in chalk or charcoal. It’s usually just a “19” or an “XIX” with the Xs made to look as much like fleurs-de-lys as the artist can manage, referring to the regnal number of a theoretical future King Louis (deliberately ambiguous as to whether they mean Louis-Philippe in London or the king of Moldavia and Wallachia). Normally this would be dismissed as a few dumb young
épateurs trying to shock their elders, and that’s probably all it is, but there’s a new wrinkle.
Until the past couple of years, the main counterargument to royalism (aside from “shut up or we’ll imprison you/fine you a large percentage of your net worth”) was that the last few French kings were completely worthless, every good decision they ever made was at the behest of some minister or other, and France still has plenty of ministers who can make decisions of equal or greater value without the king getting in the way. But if you look at the various younger French Bourbons, it seems like being dethroned and occasionally decapitated has knocked some sense into them.[8] By all reports, Louis-Philippe is a good teacher, his son Ferdinand d’Orleans is a good colonel, his other son Louis d’Orleans is a good captain, and François died like a hero. No one can say how Louis-Philippe or one of his surviving sons would do as kings… which is less than we can say about the Orleanist claimant and his brother. More on them later, but suffice to say the Orleanists are feeling very smug. (In secret, of course.)
Nobody can do anything about this. Royalist propaganda is as illegal as ever, but news from Louisiana or eastern Europe is perfectly legal. Guizot hates it more than anybody—the last thing he needs is for the rest of France to think they’re all still closet royalists.
Jacobin Party head François Arago, on the other hand, feels like this is exactly what he needs. Not only are they the smallest party, but they’re in danger of splitting on all sorts of issues. Working conditions. The right to organize. The right to education—which you wouldn’t think would be controversial, since secular education is one of the things Jacobins like best about modern France. It’s just that too many parents seem to want their children in those schools, not in the factories and mines. Their chief spokesperson is the radical Louis August Blanqui, brother to Dupont de l’Eure’s interior minister, Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui.
A split would be deadly for the Jacobins. The party gets its brawling strength from the working men and its money (and votes in the electoral system) from the wealthy traders and factory owners, and it needs both. But these days it seems like every issue pits the poor Jacobins against the rich. The way the system is set up, the rich Jacobins don’t need the votes of the poor, but as the rebellion ten years ago showed, you never know when you might need their muscle. And without the rich behind them, all those strong working men concentrated at the nerve centers of industry and power have no recourse but violence. And this isn’t even getting into the Dutch-speaking Jacobins in the north, the German-speaking Jacobins in Alsace and
le pouce mayençais, and the Polish and Hungarian immigrants in the big cities, many of whom are actually very conservative in their views but support the Jacobins because they don’t feel like anybody else is willing to represent them.
The good news is that against royalism, the whole party stands united. Against the overweening demands of priests and nobles, likewise. Against what the
Moniteur calls “antijudaism[9]”—
hey, some of our best friends are Jews, and boy are we proud of it! Against increases in the price of bread… well, the poor Jacobins need to eat and the rich ones remember their history.
So this is definitely feeding the party. Whether it’s nourishment or empty calories, only history will be able to say.
If the parties in Paris are united on anything, it’s the war against China. Conservatives are aghast that those heathens would dare attack good Frenchmen, Liberals are aghast that
anyone would dare get in the way of French commerce, and Jacobins never miss a chance to give a decrepit monarchy a good kick to the groin. This is an even worthier cause than keeping the Russians out of the Mediterranean and making friends in Macedonia.
Plus, all this will give the French armed forces a chance to see how good their navy really is, which is important. The British swear their mobile batteries are strictly defensive weapons, but the French can’t help but notice that they put a lot more British firepower in the Sleeve, where so much French commerce passes through. What makes it worse is that, with the advent of the screw propeller, the paddle-powered warships France worked so hard to build are now more or less obsolete. The only advantage of the paddles is that they let a ship turn in place, and that isn’t something you want to do on a regular basis—it puts enormous strain on the paddles, the engines, and the whole frame of the ship.
Luckily they already have engines. Refitting them for screws, while a nuisance, is not impossible, and removing the wheels will free up more room on board for the lovely new guns M. Paixhans has finally perfected.[10] And they know those guns work, because while the eyes of all Europe and the Near East were focused on the banks of the Danube this summer, a French warship equipped with a Paixhans bow chaser was escorting a merchantman when they were accosted by an Acehnese pirate fleet. One of the pirate ships was permitted to flee home and inform their brethren that French-flagged ships were henceforth to be avoided at all costs. Anyone shot at by a Paixhans gun will
wish they were facing an American columbiad. Briefly.
Yes, in all fields and all aspects of science—theories, discoveries, practical applications—France is either leading the way or at least keeping pace with Britain and Hanover. One of the more jaw-dropping discoveries of the last five years came when scholars, after much debate, finally concluded that the fossils found in the Engis caves of northern France could only belong to an entirely new species of human—
Homo engiensis[11], or Engis man. Extinct or not, that’s kind of a big deal.
Meanwhile, Évariste Galois has the whole French mathematical establishment exploring the possibilities of group theory, with help from the École Polytechnique’s new difference engine, while he himself maintains a long-range rivalry with the Norwegian-born mathematician Niels Henrik Abel in Hannover[12]. France is still the biggest producer of white phosphorus, although you do
not want to see what happens to some of the people who make it—not every factory takes as many precautions as the Stablers’ plant in Martinsburg. On a somewhat safer note, Paris’s theaters have learned the use of limelight from London’s. Argentography is a new fad. Galvanized ironwork, shining silver instead of black, has become a status symbol on homes in the better neighborhoods of Paris and Anvers, and inside those houses are bespoke tapestries, drapes, curtains, and carpets woven by programmed looms. The telegraph grid has spread north to the coast and Waal and as far as Caen, Orleans, and Luxembourg, and in another few years it will, like the railroads, reach every corner of France.
But not every scientific discovery is wholeheartedly accepted. Young Richard Colin has come back to Bordeaux, and he’s come with a warning. He’s been to the Frescobaldi vineyards of Virginia, and he’s seen what happens when you try to grow French or Italian vinestock in New World soil. What happens is, they wither and die. The culprit, he’s found, is an insect almost too small to see, which he has given the name of
Ampeloctona rhizepimola[13], the vine-murderer that invades the root.
There are ways around this. You can hybridize
Vitis vinifera with the more resistant New World species. Grafting
vinifera vines onto native rootstock works even better. The one thing that no one must ever,
ever do is import vines from the New World, at least without carefully inspecting them for ampeloctona eggs.
So he’s been writing letters to everybody he can think of who might have some influence—the papers in every port city starting with Bordeaux itself, vine-growers, wine sellers, wine brokers, scientific journals, government officials in charge of imports, his Representative, even the Emperor himself. Some of these people have actually noticed, but not, curiously, the scientific establishment. Colin’s teachers remember him as a bright but argumentative young man who thought his own prosaic observations made him smarter than the great Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. Even at this early stage, where scientists are just starting to call themselves “scientists” instead of “natural philosophers,” when you meet a self-proclaimed scientist who thinks he knows better than the entire scientific community, there’s about a 90% chance he’s a crank. Sad to see a bright boy go down that road so early in his career, but he is only 21. There’s still time for him to make some real contributions, once he swallows his pride and admits how much he still has to learn.
But Colin keeps at it, because this is
important. His family’s way of life and one of France’s most iconic and beloved industries are at stake. He has no way of knowing that he’s already too late.
[1] Her sister Agnese is seven years older and already married.
[2] Specifically, he was 62 years older than her and 35 years older than her mother.
[3] You can get a general idea of her appearance from the women in
this painting.
[4] Among other things, Napoleon wants his dynasty to be patrons of the arts in France, so he needed somebody who knew at least as much about art and music as he did, and preferably more. Ippolita qualifies—she was sad when Green went home, cried literal tears when Paganini died, and is still hoping she can coax Rossini out of retirement.
[5] And why do I keep centering
his feelings? Because he’s the emperor, that’s why.
[6] The Kerguelen Islands IOTL
[7] About half again as many as Paris IOTL. This France has a stronger economy.
[8] To Elmar’s way of thinking, of course, this just proves the Revolution and even the Terror were good for everyone, including the people they tried to kill.
[9] Which will end up being TTL’s official term for anti-Semitism
[10] IOTL the biggest problem Paixhans had was enough quality iron to build reliable guns. This is one more place where it helps TTL’s France to have OTL’s Belgium and its industry.
[11]
Homo neanderthalensis IOTL
[12] Who also died young IOTL, although from tuberculosis rather than a duel
[13] IOTL it was first described as
Phylloxera vastatrix
