The Dead Skunk

[Stolengood]

Also... I noticed one of Poe's last libretti was "unfinished". PLEASE don't tell me he doesn't get a happy ending ITTL... if anything, that's the thing he deserves the most. PLEASE give him a happier adult life than IOTL.

If I might recommend: Poe had a rather-overlooked gift for comedy, as well, so... I could easily see him providing the libretto to at least one comic opera, if not a few. Certainly with a happier life, his work is a little bit more lighthearted.

 

[Lycaon pictus]

Hmmmm... will Percy Shelley decide to come home and make something of the political turmoil?

This would be about the right time for that. Italy Reborn has at last received its final revision and been published in full. Meanwhile, Byron is off blowing things up and Keats is staying in Paris where the critics are nicer and translating Italy Reborn into French with the help of a certain young poet named Victor.

True, but in the context of a Conservative government which is likely to believe that social unrest has been whipped up by Bonapartist France that subject might come up more than OTL.

Plus the fact that Rome isn't quite as conservative as it was IOTL… which may make it scarier.

Also... I noticed one of Poe's last libretti was "unfinished". PLEASE don't tell me he doesn't get a happy ending ITTL... if anything, that's the thing he deserves the most. PLEASE give him a happier adult life than IOTL.

Did you also notice the year it was written in?

Poe's life will be a good deal longer than IOTL, and will take some interesting turns… but, on the whole, will contain a lot more happiness. (That particular libretto, Voyage to the South Pole, was one of his earlier works that he was never quite satisfied with, but Green decided it was worth salvaging and got someone else to finish it.)

If I might recommend: Poe had a rather-overlooked gift for comedy, as well, so... I could easily see him providing the libretto to at least one comic opera, if not a few. Certainly with a happier life, his work is a little bit more lighthearted.

Much of it, yes. If you look at that list, One Servant, Two Masters is a very loose adaptation of Goldoni's A Servant of Two Masters, and Lord Jordan is an even looser adaptation of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Both of them are set in London and poke fun at those (from an American POV) stuffy class-obsessed British. (IOTL, some of Verdi's best operas were translations/adaptations of Shakespeare, so it makes sense that TTL's Green and Poe would translate and adapt Italian and French masterworks for American opera.) Arnolph, Agnes and Horace is basically The School for Wives set in Boston among the American elite, and The Prince of Marcillac is an original adventure-comedy about François de la Rouchefoucauld.

And it's not like he only writes librettos — his career also includes poetry, short stories and even some journalism, most notably… but that would be telling.

 

[Stolengood]

Much of it, yes. If you look at that list, One Servant, Two Masters is a very loose adaptation of Goldoni's A Servant of Two Masters, and Lord Jordan is an even looser adaptation of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Both of them are set in London and poke fun at those (from an American POV) stuffy class-obsessed British. (IOTL, some of Verdi's best operas were translations/adaptations of Shakespeare, so it makes sense that TTL's Green and Poe would translate and adapt Italian and French masterworks for American opera.) Arnolph, Agnes and Horace is basically The School for Wives set in Boston among the American elite, and The Prince of Marcillac is an original adventure-comedy about François de la Rouchefoucauld.

And it's not like he only writes librettos — his career also includes poetry, short stories and even some journalism, most notably… but that would be telling.

Could I suggest an addition? An original opera, spawned from what IOTL produced two comic short stories, "The Spectacles" and "Lionizing", these two plots forming a sort of intertwining double-act in the play itself (obviously, you need a heroine, too, but that can be done in this instance out of whole cloth). They're two of the funniest short stories I've ever read, especially from Poe; with suitable revisions, they're more than suited to the purposes of a comic opera.

Also, it may be interesting to note that Poe was apparently fluent in several languages, including French, Italian, and German. He may work better with Verdi, especially with regards to translation, than it might first appear.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

I've lost track somewhat of Irish affairs; though they were essentially no longer a factor after Emmet's rebellion in 1803 (and that's a generous date,) I wonder if increased turmoil in Britain will eventually lead to a resurgence in separatist sentiment. I'm interested especially because ITTL, with a comparatively more liberal Catholicism and harsher government by the Tories, the conditions might be right for the relatively broad-based movement of the United Irishmen to make comeback rather than the increasingly sectarian movements of OTL.

 

[Lycaon pictus]

And now for something completely different.



“The first rule of traveling to the Twin Cities is never, ever to refer to them as the Twin Cities where anyone can hear you. As far as the people of Girard[1] and Alpheus[2] are concerned, their hometowns are two completely different places that happen to be on opposite sides of the same river but have nothing else in common. They root for different teams, drink different beers, wines and sodas, and swear they have completely different accents, although professional linguists have never been able to confirm this. Girardians think Alpheus is a cultural void and Alpheans think Girard is a pit of depravity. It’s like New York versus Chicago, only a lot smaller, closer and nastier.

“They even swear the food is different. Of course, nowadays you can find almost any sort of food in either town, but Alpheans insist that their barbecue and pizza[3] are more authentic, and Girardians say the same of their Louisiana and Florida restaurants. And based on personal experience, if you want an Irish pub that at least tries to be authentic, go to Alpheus.

“It was like this at the beginning. Alpheus was founded in October of 1822 to take advantage of the Chattahoochee rapids as a power source for the textile industry. Girard, on the other hand, was founded in August of 1822 to take advantage of the rapids and the planned Alabama and Chattahoochee Canal. See? Completely different. (The funny thing is that right up until the end of the Troubles, Lowell, Massachusetts had as many spindles running as both of them put together.)

“And at the beginning, there actually were some pretty major differences. If you’re in Girard and you go to the neighborhood they call Red Landing, just south of the old mills, that used to be a Cherokee settlement — Alpheus didn’t even allow Indians to live in the town limits. Once the canal was finished in January of 1830, Girard grew a lot faster — Alpheus didn’t start to catch up until the railroad came along. Then in 1840, a branch of the National University was set up in Girard, and suddenly the place was a college town…"

--An Informal Guide to the American South

​

[1] Phenix City, Alabama
[2] Columbus, Georgia
[3] Pizza is very much a Southern thing ITTL.

 

[eliphas8]

Is the skunk okay? Also subscribed.

 

[Stolengood]

Love the names... where'd you get them?

 

[Lycaon pictus]

Is the skunk okay? Also subscribed.

The titular skunk is long since dead. On the plus side, once the army was gone the owl came back and got a good meal.

Love the names... where'd you get them?

Girard was the name of a town in the same location that ITTL got absorbed into Phenix City. Alpheus was the name of a Greek river god, so I figured it would work for a city built around water power, and would be more interesting than naming yet another city "Columbus." Also, I just loved the image of Girard, Alabama and Alpheus, Georgia squaring off across from each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee and swearing they're nothing alike.

Notice that the deep South is going to industrialize more than IOTL, but still won't be able to keep up with the northern states.

EDIT: Forgot to mention Ireland. It won't come up for a while yet.

 

[Lycaon pictus]

Over the course of the spring of 1822, the Sultan’s armies fought their way down the Drin valley until, in June, they reached the sea and placed Scutari under siege. This siege, much of which was carried out in swamplands near the Montenegro border, nearly ended in the first two months — not because of military action, but because of an outbreak of malaria among the besiegers. Nonetheless, Tependelenle Ali was slowly losing ground in the north.

Unfortunately for the Sultan, his armies elsewhere in the north were losing ground. The appearance of Astrakhan Cossacks at Pogoanele that May had not only helped drive an Ottoman army into retreat and cut off Moldavia from the empire, but had signaled that Russia was now openly intervening. The Cossacks claimed that they had volunteered and were in Moldavia of their own free will, but Mahmud dismissed this with a single remark to Izmiri Haci Salih Pasha[1]: “The Cossacks work for the Tsar.” The problem was that to acknowledge as much publicly would be to risk full-scale war with Russia, which at this point would surely doom the empire…


The planned attack on Euboea threatened to break the stalemate in Greece. In July of 1822, the rebels held the mountain passes through the Pindus, and with them the west coast. To the south, the same isthmus that allowed Kolokotronis to hold the Peloponnesus as an impregnable bastion also allowed the Turks to prevent him from getting out. To the east, Athens and its immediate environs were still holding on, but under increasing pressure.

And at sea, the islands were falling one by one. The Dodecanese, the Cyclades, Rhodes and most of Crete were under Greek control. With the Turkish navy still recovering from the attack in the Golden Horn, a June expedition from Samos had seized the valuable island of Chios, source of prized mastic. Vahid Pasha and many Turkish families were smuggled off the island to safety by the Chiotes themselves.[2]

The largest concentration of Ottoman forces was in central Greece, keeping the various rebel armies separate from one another. The large island of Euboea lay off the coast of central Greece. If the rebels took Euboea, the Sultan’s army would have to retreat to the plains of Thessaly or be surrounded, not only ceding the heart of Greece but allowing the rebels to unite. At this point, barring an intervention by Muhammad Ali Pasha (who was still preoccupied with the Persians and Wahhabis) the war would effectively be over.

The attack came in August. Circumventing the Ottoman patrol of the northern and eastern coasts, Konstantinos Kanaris and his men landed on the beaches near Karystos and seized the town, triggering uprisings against the empire in other towns on Euboea before the army could restore order.

When it happened, the restoration of order was of the solitudinem faciunt variety. In Negroponte, Karystos, Kymi and Aliveri, tens of thousands of Greek men of fighting age were killed while women and children were sold into slavery…


The massacres did have their intended effect — Euboea remained under the Sultan's control for the time being — but they had a disastrous effect on the Empire's foreign relations. The Chamber of Deputies in Paris and the Assembly in Terni rang for days with denunciations of the Sultan. Italian Foreign Minister Foscolo hinted that he was prepared to recognize the legitimacy of a Greek government, although as yet the rebels had been unable to create one. The Tsar called the massacres “a crime against civilization itself” and his Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Popular Enlightenment issued sermons reminding the people of their spiritual brotherhood with the Greeks and their long history of enmity with the Turks. (The Greek massacres of Turks on Crete, carried out in reprisal, generally drew little comment.) From Vienna came only silence.

In London there came a reaction — but not from the government proper. Hitherto, Whitehall had taken no action either to encourage or thwart the rebels. Lord Castlereagh had believed that the Ottoman Empire, “sick man of Europe” though it might be, would prevail against the rebels on its own — but if this did not happen, the United Kingdom would have a problem. Italy and Russia had already tendered aid to the Greek rebels. If the rebellion succeeded, a Greece allied to Italy and France would substantially weaken the British position in the Mediterranean, especially if Egypt were to follow suit. A Greece allied to Russia would threaten Constantinople, which would be even worse. It was not unthinkable that Britain might have intervened to assist the Turks, via loans from the Bank of England or the sale of old warships… until Euboea.

The massacres sparked outrage in London. To Radicals, they represented the violent suppression of a people who hungered for freedom, while to Conservatives they were crimes against Christians by non-Christians, and as such a challenge to all Christendom. Orators and preachers took to the streets to denounce the massacres and enslavaments. “The public parks have of late been made hideous by the cries of would-be modern Ezekiels against the crimes of the Turk, dwelling with an indecent fervour upon the image of Christian women in the clutches of Mahometan slavers — ‘their fair flesh quivering under the rough and swarthy hands of their brute captors’ and so forth,” lamented Lord Donoughmore.

All this happened at a time when the Foreign Office was still getting its feet under it after the Fife House murder-suicide. Lord Clancarty, the new foreign secretary, was unprepared to make major changes to British policy in the Near East at a moment’s notice. But while Clancarty dithered, others acted. John Bowring founded the London Philhellenic Committee that winter to raise money for the Greek cause…


At the end of November, Tependelenli Ali’s forces launched a desperate lightning attack out of the mountains. In a battle that has been compared to the Midnight Charge at Nancy, the Albanians took Kukës and drove the Ottoman reserves back as far as Prizren. The main Ottoman army in the Drin valley had been cut off from its supplies just in time for the first winter snowstorms.

Kemal Demirci, The Cardboard Lion: The Last Years of the Ottoman Empire​

[1] His Grand Vizier at this point.
[2] According to everything I’ve read, the Greeks of Chios had a lot of family and commercial ties to the rest of the empire and many of them didn’t really want to be “liberated” in the first place, so this seems like something that could happen. I swear I’m not trying to make people feel even worse about the massacre than they normally would.


Below: Blue flags — Greeks; Green flags — Ottomans; Red and black flags — Albanians; Dark red Xs — massacres.

 

[Stolengood]

By the way... no French Algeria ITTL, correct?

 

[Lycaon pictus]

By the way... no French Algeria ITTL, correct?

That depends on two things: the British attitude towards the French having a naval base in the southern Med, and (most of all) the dey of Algiers being able to stamp out piracy in his own territory. (Hostis humani generis and all that.)

 

[Stolengood]

That depends on two things: the British attitude towards the French having a naval base in the southern Med, and (most of all) the dey of Algiers being able to stamp out piracy in his own territory. (Hostis humani generis and all that.)

To be fair, IOTL, French Algeria came about because Charles X wanted a military excursion to ward off popular dissatisfaction; the colonization was incidental. ITTL, without a Charles X, there's clearly no need for any of that.

 

[Magnum]

I must say, this is an awesome TL. Took me about 3 days, but I finally reached the latest post. Congratulations on a very well-written story, great character and impressive research.

Should you happen to have any questions regarding ideas you may have for the Romanian Principalities, feel free to PM me, although, going by how well thought-out and researched the TL is, I doubt you would need any help.

Subscribed.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Just posting to say that I took the time to reread the timeline, and it's even better the second time. Knowing to look for Elmar references, for example, certainly paid dividends.

 

[Lycaon pictus]

I must say, this is an awesome TL. Took me about 3 days, but I finally reached the latest post. Congratulations on a very well-written story, great character and impressive research.

Should you happen to have any questions regarding ideas you may have for the Romanian Principalities, feel free to PM me, although, going by how well thought-out and researched the TL is, I doubt you would need any help.

Subscribed.

I always like to get expert opinions whenever I can.

Just posting to say that I took the time to reread the timeline, and it's even better the second time. Knowing to look for Elmar references, for example, certainly paid dividends.

Thank you both. Be sure to look for more tidbits about Elmar and Elmarism — and also something called "aristism."

 

[fanthemadman]

This is simply superb. Thank you for writing it. Also.. subbed.

 

[Lycaon pictus]

Glad you like it! This calls for… more. We haven't heard from France in a while.


When the electoral returns of 1822 came in, the Liberal Party no longer held a plurality in the Chamber of Deputies. It had 52 representatives, exactly as many as the Conservatives. Only the 19 Jacobins allowed the Liberals to maintain a majority.

This was partly a result of the simple fact that with the death of Louis and the end of the war, conservative voters were seeing the need to accept the current government as legitimate, at least for the time being. But a great deal of the credit for the Conservatives’ new fortunes must go to the deputy from Besançon, Jean-Joseph-Antoine de Courvoisier. In 1820 he had gained the leadership of the Conservative Party, supplanting both Jules de Polignac as chairman and Jean-Baptiste de Villèle as head of the delegation. He not only saw the need to duplicate what Carnot had done with the Liberal Party organization, but the need for the party to expand its numbers beyond the secret royalists of the Vendée and the south. Under Courvoisier’s leadership, the Conservative Party had become the party of rural interests, while the Jacobins under Grégoire were increasingly the party of cities, immigrants and industrial workers.

The Conservatives’ success placed the Liberal Party in a difficult position. They now absolutely depended on Jacobin votes for their majority, yet to respond to the election by going further to the left seemed quixotic at best. To cooperate with the Conservatives would have meant a much larger majority, but the two parties had fundamental disagreements on a number of important issues.

In agricultural policy, the Conservatives favored price supports for French grain and wine, modeled on the British Corn Laws. Liberals and Jacobins both sharply opposed this, for three reasons:
• Anyone who had been paying attention to British politics knew that the Corn Laws were the cause of a good deal of unrest in Britain itself, and therefore hardly something to emulate.
• Far from helping French farmers, raising the price of domestic grain would make them less able to compete with grain from the United States. Any attempt to compensate for this by placing tariffs on American grain would jeopardize France’s relationship with its allies at a time when France had only a few allies.
• As Carnot put it, “Some of us remember what happened to the last French government that let the price of bread go out of reach.”

In education policy, Conservatives were opposed to the central government’s monopoly on education. They sought to place the increasing number of lycées under local control, and to grant permission for the Catholic Church to establish new schools independent of the French education system. Liberals, and Jacobins even more so, suspected that this was a plot to bring religious intolerance and monarchist indoctrination in through France’s back door.

Then there were the intertwined issues of religion and civil rights. Conservatives sought to remove the power of the state to nominate Catholic bishops, and to declare Catholicism the sole official religion, not merely the majority religion as the Concordat of 1801 had stated. This would have meant disestablishing Calvinism, Lutheranism and Judaism as official religions — unacceptable to Jacobins and many Liberals. (Ironically, many Liberals opposed the Jacobin position of full state secularism because it would have done the same thing, and would have removed the influence of Paris over the Catholic church in France.) The Conservative Party also had a strong anti-Judaic streak that Liberals saw as a potential source of social disruption, although this usually manifested more in the form of unkind words than actual policy suggestions.

Finally, there was the question of infrastructure development — specifically canals. If canal-building in France did not have quite the same strategic urgency as it did in the United States, it was nonetheless a government priority. But unlike the railroad boom that came to all France in the 1830s, the growth of canals occurred primarily in the Liberal north and east, where the coal and iron ore were found, and where France would most likely need to move and supply armies in the future. (Of particular concern was bypassing the stretch of the Rhine that flowed through Prussia, subjecting French commerce to Nordzollverein tariffs. The Koechlin family were major investors in this project, hoping to allow American cotton to flow freely from the port of Anvers to the textile center of Mulhouse.) The south and west, where Conservatives were strongest, believed that they were being bypassed. (And they were — literally. The completion of the Burgundy Canal, which the Liberal Party had committed itself to by the end of the decade, would make it possible to travel from Paris to Marseille without setting foot on a southern or western road.) Conservatives wanted more attention paid to the French road system. Liberals were sympathetic, but given limited time and resources, considered the canals a higher priority.

The question before the Liberal leadership now was how to balance the need to keep the Jacobins friendly against the need to address at least a few of the Conservatives’ issues. The first change they made was, in fact, a change of leadership. The aging Lanjuinais and Carnot both retired, replaced by Jacques-Charles Dupont de L’Eure and treasury minister Jacques Lafitte. Lanjuinais would spend his last years completing his memoirs.

Michel Noailles, The Liberal Party and the Making of Modern France (Eng. trans)​

 

[SenatorChickpea]

An update- delightful!

Question- with the Jacobins remaining a force, how will the 89 revolution be commemorated in this timeline? More plaster elephants or what?

 

[100Fathoms]

Great post Sir, this continues to be one of the best TL in pre 1900.

 

[PulkitNahata]

Loving this TL more and more.