Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

[KingSweden24]

"...as 1918 began to draw to a close, it became more obvious than ever - even if Castelnau was loathe to admit it even in meetings of the "Inner Cabinet," as Poincaré called the select group of close hands and senior ministers who formed something of a small council to debate matters of utmost secrecy - that "All Theaters" was unsustainable. No matter how many Korean and Formosan mercenaries were imported to Vietnam, no matter how many sepoys deployed, or Europeans recruited to the Foreign Legion and zouaves from across the colonies formed into fighting cadres, the rate of French military spending could not be maintained. The budget simply would not allow the expenditures on keeping the largest army in Europe and largest colonial garrisons equipped, clothed, fed and well-paid at the same time that the Navy grew aggressively to stay ahead of German and Italian fleet construction, or that the Corps Aerienne was given a blank cheque to experiment with new airplane designs, courtesy of CASD and its incestuous relationship with the military brass.

The Poincaré ministry had, already, raised both tariffs and taxes in the last year to narrow the chronic budget deficits, a deflationary measure in a time of otherwise booming European economies that began to augur a potential major French recession the following year; French banks were overextended, long on debt and increasingly short on gold as Britain, Germany and Russia continued to maximize their ability to reach and attract new gold mining sources quicker and more effectively than France could. Paris was, quite simply, overextended, overleveraged, and the chickens were coming home to roost.

This was the context of the infamous October 20, 1918 memorandum issued by the chief researchers at the Quai d'Orsay read into the minutes of the Inner Cabinet by Paleologue, and whose discovery marked a major part of German-Italian leveraging of war guilt towards France in the aftermath of the Central European War. The memorandum stated that due to the "response of the content in kind" to French rearmament (specifically, Italy), the "French advantage in arms is dwindling quickly." How quickly, Castelnau scoffed? The diplomats, it turned out, had an answer for that, too: by the end of 1919, the German-Italian alliance would be at parity with the pre-Belgian alignment Iron Triangle; by the end of 1920, they would be ahead of it. The Belgian inclusion in French strategic planning had bought France about a year to eighteen months, but that was still not very much time, essentially meaning that parity would arrive in mid-1920 and then the Central Powers would enjoy the advantage in arms, ships, planes and other assets by late 1921. Germany already had a considerable demographic manpower advantage, too; Austria negated this, as did Belgium to a lesser extent, but that was the other crux of the issue: Austria.

The Hungarian Crisis that had gripped central Europe for close to two years had to some extent abated with the imposition of martial law across the whole of the Habsburg Monarchy but the Quai d'Orsay, and by extension most French policymakers who read their briefs, had severe doubts about the course Ferdinand was taking and believed that while a civil war in Austria was unlikely anytime soon, it was likely to occur within three years if a compromise solution of some sort was not reached, meaning that the Dual Monarchy could potentially become useless as an ally without a major course correction right around the time that the German-Italian alliance reached material superiority. With France unable to maintain its current pace in the arms race much longer from a budgetary standpoint, if budget cuts became a necessity, then the speed with which they would drift behind their continental peers would accelerate. The mood on October 20 thus was grim; France had no good options in front of it, all of them essentially just an election to decide how quickly they would manage their decline into irrelevance.

It was from this meeting that the sense that France "needed" a war while they maintained their modest strategic advantage, before Austria's constitutional disputes became existential or Germany and Italy accelerated past them. All they needed was an inciting affair of some kind that could trigger the Iron Triangle, and while nobody in that room was willing to go out of their way to engineer one, they would not shed a tear if one landed in their lap, as the collective reaction was.

As it so happened, mere days later, they more or less got what they were looking for as gunshots rang out in Vienna..."

- La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Elisabeth was known by friends and admirers alike to always be highly reluctant to travel to Budapest; while she had not accompanied her parents on their fateful June 1898 trip where they had perished, there was something about the city that unnerved her, as if she could feel the weight there of the split seconds of that terrible day, twenty years later, that had rendered her an orphan at the age of only fourteen.

Hers was a life of contradictions, though, an Archduchess of the Austrian Imperial family who sympathized and socialized with socialists, a doting mother who carried on torrid affairs with the consent and indeed approval of her equally-libertine husband, who went by the diminutive "Erszi" despite a Magyar anarchist having taken her parents' lives. She had escaped the prison of Emperor Franz Josef's strict control into a loveless morganatic marriage [1] that granted her what she had always wanted: the freedom to chart her own course, and never had that seemed more dangerous, daring and necessary than the end of 1918.

She had arrived in Budapest on October 19, 1918, to attend a birthday celebration for a friend, but the true purpose was to thereafter make her way to the Alcsut Palace, the home of Archduke Joseph August, a distant cousin by blood and a direct marriage by relative as his wife's mother, Princess Gisela of Bavaria, was Elisabeth's aunt. [2] Joseph August was in many ways the opposite of Emperor Ferdinand; he was kind and patient, a devoted husband, and most crucially enormously popular with Hungarian citizens, in part through his service in the House of Magnates but also by virtue of having lived most of his life in Hungary, speaking both Magyar and Slovak fluently in addition to German, French and English, and his silence in the face of the two years of frequent political crises gripping the Crownlands of Saint Stephen had been interpreted not as neglect of Hungary or tacit support of Ferdinand, but rather a courteous quiet out of respect - sympathy, in other words.

But Joseph August was not any mere Habsburg Archduke; he was the titular Palatine of Hungary, a position which had lost all temporal relevance in the aftermath of 1848 but which had once held a power equivalent to a viceregal representative of the Habsburg Crown. As 1918 drew of a close and the dubious seventy-year anniversary of the Spring of Nations went noticed by just about everyone in the Habsburg realms, a number of moderates in Vienna and Budapest alike had begun discussing, secretly of course, a potential solution out of the seemingly endless stalemate between the intransigent Magyarphobes around Ferdinand and the delusional '48ers now ensconced in Swiss exile and accusing the Hofburg of trying to have them murdered. Dubbed in English-speaking scholarship and contemporary press as the "Palatine Plot" - a silly name but which got the thrust of the matter across - it was a discussion that had gotten surprisingly close to Ferdinand himself, close enough that its chief advocates had taken the remarkable step of recruiting "Erszi," the Emperor's own cousin once removed, as an unexpected go-between.

Elisabeth was skeptical, to say the least, and cared little for Hungarian politics either way, but for a brief moment, considered it her patriotic and familial duty - especially as Ferdinand had always, personally at least, been quite kind to her, helping shield her somewhat from the eccentricities and expectations of her domineering grandparents in the wake of her parents' assassination in June 1898 - to try to help however she could. As such, on October 23, having made her appearances at a grand gala of Hungary's aristocracy at the Royal Opera House on Budapest's Andrassy Avenue, the Magyar answer to the Champs d'Elysees, she surreptitiously arranged for a motor transport to "visit family" at Alcsut [3], a request nobody would think second of.

Elisabeth did not know Joseph August well, what with him spending the vast majority of his time in Hungary and rarely visiting court in Vienna, and her taking wide leave of Viennese court intrigues as it was. At Alcsut, however, he welcomed her as he would a younger sister that he had not seen in a fortnight, and that night they had a lovely dinner with outstanding tokaji as his son Matthias regaled her with poetry he had learned from his tutor and his wife - Elisabeth's cousin, Auguste Maria - described the preparations they were making for a grand 25th wedding anniversary celebration on the grounds of Alcsut for a month later. It was a brief glance for Elisabeth at something she had been denied and unable to form on her own, that of a happy, functional family, even within the claustrophobic and asphyxiating confines and regulations of Der Haus von Habsburg.

After Auguste Maria and the children had retired, however, Joseph August invited her to a drawing room at the other end of the palace, where there was more tokaji on offing along with an excellent brandy, and though his demeanor remained affable, he quickly got down to brass tacks. He noted that while he appreciated and enjoyed her visit, she knew as well as he did that Elisabeth Marie, Archduchess of Austria and daughter of the slain Crown Prince Rudolf, did not make social calls to family ofter and certainly not on a whim, especially not within the borders of Hungary. He asked, politely but pointedly, what had really inspired her to drop in on him.

It was here that Elisabeth laid it all out on the table, what she had been approached in Vienna even by men close to the Emperor - members of the so-called "Prague Circle" - to convey, more as a trial balloon than anything else. Though the protests in Budapest and industrial towns nearby had subsided considerably since the suspension of the Diet, and a booming economy with rapidly rising wages had sated a great many, there was still a sense that the crisis was just waiting to erupt again, especially with Karolyi's accusation that the Hofburg had tried to have him killed in Zurich. Influential members at Court in Vienna and in the Reichsrat, and important military figures such as the well-regarded and usually sober-minded new Chief of the General Staff Viktor Dankl von Krasnik, were all deeply unsure what was to come next if the legislature in either half of the Dual Monarchy were reconvened. With Hungary for good reason being considered the more imminent issue, this group of Austrian kingmakers were starting to think of potential face-saving solutions for both sides, and had arrived at one that was not particularly novel: the restoration of the temporal authority of the Palatine of Hungary. This would give the Hungarians a sovereign partially their own, who would only be overruled by the "head of the family" in extraordinary circumstances, while retaining their economic ties to Vienna. This would placate those who regarded the Compromise of 1867 a betrayal of Hungarian vital interests without abrogating Hungary's ancient constitution that placed genuine checks upon the monarch and restore the Crown of St. Stephen to fully co-equal as part of a personal union, with the Palatine a hereditary representative of God and Crown in Budapest, permanently.

Joseph August listened politely, not interrupting her, and she concluded by pointing out that by birthright, the title of Palatine was his; all he needed was to accede to fulfilling its powers and duties within an Austrian Empire revised to reflect a more pre-1848 status, before the failed revolution, the nineteen years of military dictatorship, and the well-intentioned but flawed Compromise. Once she was done, Joseph August concurred that on paper, it was a straightforward solution, and he noted that the Hungarian political dynamic was much more nuanced and complex than just Greens and Whites (he ignored the Reds, knowing where her sympathies lay by reputation, sympathies he vehemently did not share). He also concluded that the Habsburgs were not necessarily unpopular in Hungary - the legacy of Mohacs meant something yet - but that the Compromise and Ferdinand's behavior since taking the throne were, and had done real damage to the Empire's prestige amongst, at least, the Hungarian intelligentsia. While his comment that "this is a Hungarian problem, and it will take a Hungarian solution" at first suggested to her that he perhaps did not think the crisis as severe as it really was, his intention was more to convey that he did not think that the Viennese understood what they were talking about, which he quickly elaborated on.

The problem, however, was twofold. While Karolyi might accede to such a solution, the bigger problem was Ferdinand's White allies, who would probably correctly presume that without the safeguards of Vienna's support, their social and economic position would rapidly collapse, and Hungary pivoting to a personal union without the Compromise's careful splits on military funding (which Hungary regularly abrogated or filibustered) and economics would immediately become an issue. The second problem was that Ferdinand would never, ever agree to such a solution; even in a case where more local autonomy was granted to Slavic regions, it was all part of a design that would shift the Empire in a more absolutist, anti-democratic direction and make the Hungarians co-equal not with Vienna as an administrative entity but with the Germans, Czechs, Croats, Romanians, and Poles. Appointing a Palatine thus flew directly in the face of Ferdinand's dark worldview that saw Magyarism in all its forms as the locus of all of the Dual Monarchy's many issues.

Joseph August admitted that the thought of a renewed Palatinate as being well-meaning if a little naive and underestimating the deep antipathy Ferdinand held towards the Magyars and how the seventy years since 1848 had made the Hungarians feel even more like a conquered people than they had before, and then cut to the meat of it - he was not entirely opposed to the idea, but the move would require a crisis so existential it would end in Ferdinand's abdication and a "more reasonable soul" in Vienna, and he was totally unwilling to partake in any set of events that promulgated such a crisis, for it would be a gamble on whether the Empire emerged from it looking anything like the one that currently existed. In that comment, the Palatine also betrayed that his sympathies fairly clearly lay with the Hungarian people as a legalistic matter and that he found the perpetuation of the Compromise as it existed as unworkable, but also felt a deep personal loyalty to the family that he would never betray.

Elisabeth was unsure what exactly to say to continue the conversation; Joseph August had managed to be vague even when he tried to be direct, open-minded as he acted dismissive. So she retired to bed, pondering one of the more grim implications of her conversation, where Joseph August had suggested that Ferdinand specifically was the problem. She never had much of a chance to take that line of thought to one of its numerous logical conclusions, as shortly before she was to rejoin her hosts for dinner after Joseph August had been attending to business during the day, they received an urgent telegram from Vienna, one that would quickly make the oblique proffer of the night before moot, and reshape the Austria and Hungary they had both known their entire lives..."

- The Arson of Austria: Understanding Central Europe's Conflagration

[1] I lack the bandwidth these days to plot out who Archduchess Elisabeth Marie, daughter of Rudolf and Stephanie, exactly married; its unlikely to be the same suitor as OTL. So the lack of mention of her husband's name is by design.
[2] That good ol' Habsburg incest, baby!
[3] Weird coincidence, this just so happens to be Viktor Orban's hometown.

 

[KingSweden24]

The 1918 United States Senate elections were held on or in the case of certain special elections around November 5, 1918, in which all 21 Class II Senate seats were up for election. Coming into the elections, the Democratic Party held a narrow majority of seats in this class, and the Liberals were, narrowly, the majority party of the United States Senate, which they had been since 1916.

The elections were held in the context of the deep postwar economic depression that gripped the United States in the three years following the conclusion of the Great American War; September-October of 1918 is often regarded as one of the nadirs of the time. In addition to extraordinarily high unemployment and elevated inflation as the wartime economy struggled to pivot to a consumer goods economy, the incumbent administration of President Elihu Root was seen as absentee on the issues of the economy, as well as poorly managing both the occupation of the Confederate States, the spread of the deadly Great Influenza of 1918, and was seen as hostile to working class voters on issues of organized labor, while the Immigration Act of 1918 had made it even more unpopular in some immigrant communities.

Liberals thus lost a landslide, with Democrats holding all of their seats and flipping eight Liberal-held Senate seats, making a particular impact in the swingy East and Midwest while comfortably holding their Western strongholds; of particular note were the Democrats flipping both seats in Massachusetts, one being a special election due to the resignation of Henry Cabot Lodge to serve as Secretary of State. It was, at the time, the largest shift of seats from one party to another since the passage of the 15th amendment introduced the direct election of Senators, and returned Democrats to a majority under the unofficial leader in President pro tempore George Turner of Washington and his close ally, Conference Chairman John E. Osborne.

(Credit: @GDIS Pathe )

 

[KingSweden24]

"...figure well-liked by the Austrian establishment, and the feeling was reciprocated; Prince Franz and his wife, Isabella Antonie of Croy, had been married in Baden bei Wien in 1912 and often summered in Pula and its emerging riviera. Isabella had even given birth to their fourth child, Eleanore Marie, at their house in Vienna and had not felt any urge to return to Bavaria with her yet, so comfortable were they in the city. For Franz and Isabella, the posting to Vienna had not only been an intriguing opportunity but a blessing for their family, and on October 24, they were invited to a gala at the Hofburg to celebrate the return of the Habsburgs to their "winter palace" for the season.

The festivities were to last all day, with Ferdinand and Empress Maria Dorothea arriving in the late evening with an honor procession; Ferdinand was said to be hunting all day in the nearby Wienerwald, but it turns out, as he often was when "hunting," he was instead in the Mayerling hunting lodge with his longstanding mistress, the Baroness Sophie Chotek, mother of several illegitimate children of his and married to a cavalry officer suspected by historians to have been homosexual, a fact that only Ferdinand and Sophie were privy to. Though the stifling court protocols of the Hofburg had been relaxed in the previous two years somewhat by Ferdinand, his movements and that of his wife were nonetheless quite controlled, and it would be some time before they arrived at the party. To compensate for this, Maria Dorothea - a socialite who used galas, banquets, feasts and frequent travel as a coping mechanism for her unhappy marriage - had encouraged guests to arrive early for the ball, which at the last minute was made a masquerade.

Stephane Clement was, ironically, meant to have left Vienna to return to Brussels several days earlier, but a delay to his train and the chance to attend the ball - and his lack of interest in returning to Augusta Victoria and the children after three months sleeping his way through Vienna's whorehouses and the lower echelons of Court - led him to postponing his return until the first week of November. As such, he attended the gala alone, having already drank a bottle of wine to himself at home.

What happened next is a matter of great dispute. The general contours of the evening are, generally, agreed upon: at some point in the early evening, about ninety minutes before the Emperor and Empress were scheduled to arrive at the Hofburg, Stephane Clement of Belgium found himself alone with Isabella Antonie of Croy. Prince Franz of Bavaria, looking for his wife, found them in a room together, and a physical altercation occurred between himself and the Prince of Belgium. This concluded with Franz slamming Stephane Clement's head into a pillar, breaking his nose, badly bruising the right side of his face so that his eye swelled shut, and cutting a deep gash along his hairline; this all occurred in front of a Hofburg guard who had overhead the commotion and was rushing to inspect. Stephane Clement stumbled into the guard, wrestled his sidearm from his holster - guards of the Hofburg having been issues pistols only in the previous six months, on orders of Ferdinand, due to security concerns with the situation in the Habsburg Empire being what it was - and aimed at Franz.

Here, things get complicated. Stephane Clement was adamant that he and Isabella Antonie had merely been speaking privately and Franz attacked him, unprovoked, and when he drew the pistol upon his "attacker," Franz rushed him and Stephane Clement fired in self-defense after giving him a warning. The Hofburg guard, Ernst Sachs, testified that he fell backwards after Stephane Clement took the pistol off of him forcefully, and that he did not hear the prince give a verbal warning but did hear Franz shout something unintelligible before shots were fired, but could not see clearly what had happened or if Franz had moved in Stephane Clement's direction, with his view blocked by a pillar and the Belgian's body. Whatever occurred in that passageway of the Hofburg, everyone who heard the gunshots agreed that they heard one bang, very clearly, followed by three more in quick succession. Stephane Clement stated that the first bullet struck Franz in the upper chest near his heart and he lowered his gun upon realizing that he had indeed pulled the trigger, and when Franz took a second step towards him he fired three more times rapidly, instinctively, striking him in the abdomen and puncturing both his stomach and liver. Bleeding out, Franz expired within moments, lying on his left side, spitting blood out. Whatever the last words he intended to say were, they were between him and God.

Isabelle Antonie had a very different version of the story. She had met Stephane Clement socially a few times in Vienna and had always found him as grotesque as his reputation across the Courts of Europe, with an air of menace about him. As she had gone off to re-powder, he had allegedly followed her, and she had not realized it was him in the mask until he began speaking as he tried to put his hands up her skirt. He failed in his effort to rape her only because of the quick arrival of her husband, and she screamed at him that it was the Belgian prince, so that he understood the severity of the moment and did not accidentally kill her attacker with his bare hands. What came to be a matter of some controversy in the months to come was whether she had witnessed the slaying of her husband; Sachs and Stephane Clement both suggested she came out of the room to find him dead, and worried revelers and guards who rushed into the hall found her cradling his head in her arms sobbing when they arrived, but she maintained to her death in 1982 that she had seen her husband ram Stephane Clement into the pillar as they struggled, watched the Belgian pull the pistol off the guard and shove the guard onto his rear, pivot around and aim and then fire without giving her husband a chance to respond. In later years, it became an apocryphal story that Franz had raised his hands, and that what he had "shouted," according to Sachs, was a plea not to fire. This was never part of Isabella's testimony or description of the events, but she also never made any effort to correct such accounts.

Sachs leapt to his feet as Stephane Clement lowered the pistol and seized him from behind, as two other guards came charging into the hallway. The Black Prince of Belgium handed them the pistol silently, chest heaving, the stink of brandy on his breath, and as they took the masque from his face, his eyes were wild with anger, confusion, and fear. Whatever had really happened in that hallway - and historians have generally believed the accounts of Sachs and Isabella Antonie, considering Stephane Clement's reputation - it was done, and there was no going back now. His life, and indeed the world, had changed forever..."

- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement

"...Ferdinand had accepted the Belgian appeal for an alliance, but he very did much not care for Stephane Clement; that diplomatic formalities precluded his simply expelling the cretin from Vienna, especially now, was all that stopped him from pursuing such a course, and he had been delighted to hear that after overstaying his welcome well beyond a reasonable period of time, the "Black Prince" was finally going to slither his way back to Brussels. It was a dark joke that Ferdinand had delayed his scheduled return to the Hofburg on October 24 specifically because he found out Stephane Clement was going to be there; this is not true, but it was the kind of humor that became common in the postwar years, as Austrians tried to explain the bleak sequence of farcical events that followed a horrific tragedy.

What was true was that Ferdinand was running late, as was not uncommon, on his return from the Mayerling in part because the car sent to pick him up was delayed by a herd of sheep and in part because Ferdinand had given his guards strict instructions not to disturb him while with Sophie; when his car finally arrived, he was still not ready, and the guards did not knock on the door to inform them of a frantic telegram from the Hofburg warning them of shots being fired within the palace, the gala in a pandemonium, and at least one person, possibly several, having been slain in an "argument over a woman." Twenty minutes later, when Ferdinand did finally emerge from a full afternoon with his beloved mistress, he read this telegram and ordered that they return immediately - the forty-kilometer drive ahead expected to take well over an hour.

While he was returning, the frantic court retainers had elected to forbid anybody from leaving the Hofburg until the Emperor returned, which was customary anyways, but upon hearing about the death of Franz, and with no word from Franz at Mayerling, Maria Dorothea stepped in to order the palace be evacuated and the festivities cancelled. Franz's body was to be brought to a spare room and treated with respect, while Stephane Clement was told to stay where he was. The Belgian prince, naturally, protested; he maintained that as the son of a foreign King, he could not be held against his will unless he was being arrested for a crime, and curtly informed Maria Dorothea to her face that he intended to "walk out of the front gates as what I am - a free man." Maria Dorothea admitted in later years that she was tempted to slap him, shocked that he would be so insolent in the mere moments after shooting a man, but relented, stating that he was free to leave the Hofburg provided that he was under guard.

Stodgy Habsburg court protocol generally did not allow for the Viennese police to enter the grounds, without the express permission of the palace chamberlain or, barring that, the Emperor. Due to the severity of the "Hofburg Incident," as it came to be known in the immediate days thereafter, the palace staff were unwilling to break etiquette and have Ferdinand return from his intimate day "hunting" at Mayerling to the place crawling with police. As such, it would be hours until Ferdinand was back in the palace, up to speed on what had happened, and decided to ask that the Viennese police detectives come to the palace and, thereafter, go to interview Stephane Clement, who naturally was making hasty arrangements to leave Vienna as soon as that evening if he was able.

In the space between the shooting and the first interview by detectives, Ernst Sachs' story changed dramatically from initial claims amongst others that he stated that the Belgian Prince had gunned down the Bavarian Franz in cold blood; now, suddenly, he claimed that he had not had a good view of what had happened. It is unclear if his story changed because he had been pressured, or because as he tried to think of how he recalled it going down in the heat of the moment he started to doubt himself. The rumors that Sachs had told others in the palace one version shortly after the slaying, and the police and, later, the courts a different version, became a foundational piece of the German media outrage in the weeks and months to come, as did the fact that Stephane Clement had to be apprehended at his lavish apartment as he was packing his bags and formally arrested, narrowly preventing his escape from the city..."

- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor

"...October 24th, 1918 became one of those moments that seemed frozen in time; old veterans of the war could, decades later, still seem to recall where they were, and what they were doing, when they heard tell of the "Crime of the Century." There was a sense even then that something unspeakably terrible had happened, something that would forever change Europe and the world, that there was a time before October 24th, and a time after, into which history could be easily split.

The term "Hofburg affair" seemed not to do it justice; the story quickly spread that Prince Stephane Clement had tried to rape the wife of Prince Franz of Bavaria, and when her husband stepped in to pull him off and defend his wife from the unforgivable attack, he had been gunned down in cold blood in the halls of the grand Hofburg. It was lurid enough a tale on its own, but it quickly began to take on its own life, with conspiracy theories quickly promulgating, and German newspapers - even Prussian ones - baying for blood. Of course Stephane Clement was a rapist criminal who deserved nothing less than the gallows; of course the Hofburg was covering it up to protect him. And why were they protecting him? Why had Stephane Clement been in Austria, and for so long? German civil servants, well aware of the answer, finally began to leak the truth to their country's papers, which only made the firestorm worse: Stephane Clement had been in Austria securing an outright alliance with Vienna as his brother did the same in Paris, abrogating the Treaty of London, and adding a much darker wrinkle to the absurdity of the affair - a geopolitical one, of the second son of King Leopold III of Belgium murdering the third son of Ludwig III of Bavaria, the son who just happened to be the elder brother of the Empress of France, and whose sister-in-law was married to a Belgian prince herself. France, Belgium, Bavaria, Austria - it was a tangled familial web, but one that opened, as a genuine question, what way the French government would lean, especially as there was some lack of clarity in what, exactly, had occurred the night of October 24th.."

- The Central European War

"...the "Crime of the Century" was the last rites of a marriage that had long, in many ways, been dead; Helmtrud asked her husband directly what the position of "the Crown" would be after her brother lay slain by "that damned, disgusting Belgian!"

Alfie, after stating that he would pray on the matter, returned to her and stated that he had been assured by his counterparts in Vienna that Stephane Clement would be investigated and, "if appropriate," stand trial in an Austrian court rather than be allowed to return to Brussels. In the immediate days after October 24th, the opinions of people who mattered seemed to be very much against Stephane Clement. For all his faults, the Emperor of France had always found his "cousin" from Belgium lecherous in a way even his brothers were not, and he wrote in his diary on October 26th that if Stephane Clement hung for the Hofburg crime, then it would be the just judgement of God. Ferdinand II of Austria denounced "the slaying in my sanctity of my home" and cabled his condolences to King Ludwig. There was a disquieting silence from Brussels, but there was a general sense in Paris that, perhaps this time, the "Black Prince" had gone too far, finally crossed an uncrossable line that would finally so anger his father that he was finally on his own. The drugs and drinking had not done it, and even the exile to the Americas after assaulting a teenaged princess at his own brother's wedding had not driven Leopold III over the line, but perhaps this was the final straw.

As October crawled to a halt, however, the positions of many in Paris started to suddenly soften. News arrived from Vienna that Stephane Clement would, indeed, stand trial, and that he would "enjoy the chance to disprove his guilt." By that point, however, Belgian newspapers - never a friend of "Steffie" - began to openly question whether the events had even occurred, and French periodicals, including ones suspiciously aligned with the government line, began repeating this line of inquiry. Who was telling the truth? Was it even possible to know? It was not so much a defense of Stephane Clement as character assassination on Isabella Antonie, the now-widowed victim and Helmtrud's sister-in-law. Helmtrud was appalled at these attacks on her honesty in the French press; she had never known Isabella to be anything other than forthright, and she would never lie about something like this. And Franz, who was now being portrayed by French and Belgian reporters by the first days of November as an angry, violent and easily provoked man, had been anything but; he had been a naturalist, interested in fossils and reading lengthy books about science.

It was hard not to see in the shifting tenor of the coverage of the looming trial, scheduled for after Christmas, political concerns; the Belgian establishment had become convinced, or perhaps more accurately convinced itself, that the fight between Franz and Stephane Clement was not a quarrel gotten out of hand but rather an extension of the geopolitical tensions between Germany and Belgium. In that context, Franz was not a husband trying to defend his wife from a rape, but rather just another German aggressor - notwithstanding that he was not Prussian, as coverage of German expansionism usually focused in on - attacking a poor defenseless Belgian, and Stephane Clement was instead the first Belgian to nobly stand up for himself and, by extension, his country.

This absurdity was surely influenced by the accusations in German newspapers, rapidly circulating out now and not unnoticed in Britain, that Belgium had formed a formal alliance with France and Austria, and thus was in direct contravention of the Treaty of London signed in 1839. A siege mentality could be detected in how Belgians were talking about the Hofburg Affair, and it was asked in the Devoir-Bruxelles whether Germany's implication of the treaty guaranteeing Belgium being "void" was a prelude to invasion. Nonetheless, German coverage of this matter was not entirely innocent either; it was suggested, at first obliquely and before long directly, that Stephane Clement's "confidence in his crime" was a byproduct of the Franco-Belgian alliance, that now that Belgium had foresworn neutrality, the "uppity" little country that had so provoked European public opinion in the Congo now felt empowered to do as it pleased, a proverbial "blank check" and a very serious accusation that opened the door to Franz's death perhaps even being a plot orchestrated from Brussels.

Caught in the middle of this spiraling, frenzied and radicalizing and counter-radicalizing storm of speculation were the shocked Wittelsbachs, who gathered in Munich on November 9, 1918 [1] to bury Franz after his body was returned with honors by the Austrians. Helmtrud traveled with Lieutenant de Gaulle and her daughters, and it was a sign of how detached from reality the political implications of the slaying were becoming that Alfie declined to accompany her to Germany for fear of his own safety and out of concerns of the "message" it would send to "our friends in Brussels." It was an oversight that Helmtrud never forgave, and only the insistence of her father that she had to go back lest things get worse by her staying in Germany persuaded her to make her way back on November 24, a month to the day after her brother's death.

By the time she returned to Paris, the situation had dramatically changed under her feet. Wild speculation had now calcified into deeply-held beliefs; Raymond Poincare himself suggested, in a speech before the Corps Legislatif, that the accusations against Stephane Clement were "hearsay, based on a man's innoble reputation from his younger and less mature years," and without a hint of irony denounced "the efforts of the German government through their braying mouthpieces to not only try an innocent man in the press but to destabilize the continent at this time of their choosing!" Helmtrud confronted Alfie and he shrugged it off as "hot tempers amongst the Cabinet," but it was two days later, on November 28, that she was confronted with the truth spelled out more bluntly by the Dowager Empress Eugenie.

Ninety-two years old, nearly blind and deaf, and unable to walk without assistance, the Emperor's domineering and politically influential fossil of a grandmother called the Empress to her chateau and asked her to sit down. Speaking to her as she might have spoken to a child who had stolen a sibling's toy, Eugenie stated flatly that Helmtrud "needed to begin to understand" that "forces greater than your life or that of your brother" were at play; Helmtrud's duty now was to France, and France's duty was to support Belgium. Helmtrud angrily challenged her over the "truth;" had not her brother been killed, and her sister-in-law violently assaulted, by one of the most notorious lotharios and drunks of European royalty. Eugenie leaned back, smirked, and responded icily: "That may well be, but the truth of the Hofburg matters less now than the truth of public opinion, and the public has decided that the Germans are the enemy, and so that is the truth we must follow."

The battle lines were thus drawn, the truth be damned. And all the while this was going on, Stephane Clement was to go on trial in Vienna in January for the murder of her brother and the attempted rape of his sister, with the eyes of the world upon him, and the outcome of that trial potentially bringing Europe to blows..." [2]

- A Bavarian Daughter in the House of Bonaparte

[1]
[2] A long update, and a difficult one to get right, but one of the most important of the TL. I want to especially thank @Curtain Jerker for helping me crack the code on how to make Steffie responsible for the war breaking out, and congrats to Dan for guessing the outcome here correctly and @naraht for supposing Steffie would tip Europe into conflict through his penchant for rape way back when

 

[KingSweden24]

"...almost now way in late October and November of 1918 to avoid it. Newspapers chronicling the escalating war of words from the continent were flying off the shelves so fast that there were, for the first time in British history, a shortage of morning papers for all who wanted to read one in some parts of the country. Without as much skin in the game, Britain's famously yellow press avoided some of the truly absurd and destabilizing sensationalism and rhetoric that was almost passe in French, Belgian, and German papers within weeks, but nonetheless, it was a story nobody could keep their eyes off of, much in the way motorists slow down to observe a particularly spectacular collision on the side of the road.

For the Chamberlain government, however, it was not just an absurd and lurid story, it was a bonafide geopolitical crisis, easily the biggest to engulf Europe since the near-war over Siam in 1892 that the Prime Minister's father had narrowly helped defuse, and once again it featured the same protagonists, in France and Germany with Belgium thrown in as the unlikely instigator. By the end of the November, the government had largely agreed to take a wait-and-see approach, if only because they could do little else. Everybody in Whitehall, across Europe, indeed in all the halls of government in the world all stopped and took in a deep breathe, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The most immediate question in the Hofburg Crisis, as the British press termed it, was how exactly the trial that looked likely for mid-January would go. Austria, like most of continental Europe, used an inquisitorial justice system rather than an adversarial one, and British experts on civil code law suggested to the British government that the mere fact that an Austrian judge had found sufficient need in an investigation to prosecute the case against Prince Stephane Clement was a sign that he was likely to be convicted. As November wore on and turned to December, the Cabinet - full of accomplished attorneys and barristers - began to grow less convinced. What concerned them most, in particular Lord Crewe, was the very serious accusation levied by Germany against Belgium, that it had entered into an explicit defensive alliance with France and Austria-Hungary aimed at Germany in the wake of the Second Congo Crisis, over and above the stipulations of the Treaty of London. What bedeviled British civil servants, envoys, and spies across Europe in those crucial weeks at the end of 1918 was how to ascertain if this was definitively true, hearsay but with a likelihood of accuracy, or a remarkably inflammatory suggestion. The answer to that question was an answer on which the future of Europe potentially hinged.

As the level-headed Crewe explained, the Treaty of London's stipulations were bidirectional. Belgium's territorial integrity was undersigned by Britian, France, and Prussia (Austria and Russia technically as well, but their lack of physical proximity made this more of a formal legal point than one with any particular practical impact). No Great Power could invade her or attempt to partition her without - in theory - triggering a war in which other Great Powers were then to come to her aid. While this settlement clearly benefitted Belgium a great deal, it was also designed to benefit the other Great Powers, especially Britain, which avoided one of France or Germany controlling the port of Antwerp, amongst the most strategic points on the northern European coast from a British perspective. The bargain, as Crewe reminded the Cabinet, was that Belgium's independence was guaranteed by Britain in return for Belgium actually adhering to the neutrality that Britain demanded in return. Implied in this was that if Belgium had reneged on this key point and now was aligned officially with France, then Britain had no duty to defend her come what way. If Belgium had in fact not gone over to Paris formally, however, then a German-Belgian war, depending on who fired first, would leave Britain duty-bound to Belgium, which meant a British intervention on the continent for the first time since Crimea, against a much more potent and direct threat.

To say that none of the Cabinet was much interested in a conflict with Germany was an understatement. Some, like Chamberlain, were Germanophiles, much in the fashion of the King; others, like Crewe, were more skeptical of long-term German interests, but were instinctively mediators who saw little to gain for Britain to leap in on Brussels' behalf. It was also the case that Belgium had worn out her welcome years ago with its repeated insistence on a colonial regime in the Congo so brutal that it had nearly invited European intervention by a concert of the other powers, and her princes, apples having fallen close to their father's tree, shocked and scandalized the European aristocracy going back well over a decade. With some distance from the circumstances at hand, Crewe in particular took the view that Stephane Clement had only himself to blame for putting himself in the dock, and that it was insane for France and Belgium to threaten war over German insistence that he stand trial and face punishment for his very serious two crimes.

With Germanophobes such as Edward Grey a fairly minor voice in the Cabinet, and pacifists dominant amongst a Liberal inner circle that was high on their triumphant solution to Ireland and looking ahead to what executing the transfer of power in February might look like, the appetite for a general European war was low. The decision not to intervene was not taken then, but it may as well have been; as Christmas approached, it was increasingly clear that Whitehall - even those who were increasingly seeing the Germans as a growing threat alongside the French and Russians, Malcolm-Jagow be damned - was looking less likely to step in and save Belgium from itself than it had even at the start of the burgeoning crisis..."

- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924

 

[KingSweden24]

TRIGGER WARNING
(This gets very dark at the end)​

"...in 1943, WEB Dubois was asked to comment by an Irish journalist, on the occasion of both his 75th birthday as well as the 25-year anniversary of the Third Amendment of the Confederate Constitution, on the state of the Negro "a quarter century after slavery." Dubois' answers were, like usual, brilliant, succinct, and acerbic when they needed to be, and he made one very crucial point: "We must remember that the Third Amendment was done just as much to uplift as it was to punish, and that the Yankees came south as avengers, not as liberators." While Dubois was speaking with the benefit of more than two decades of hindsight, suffice to say his stance was shared even by many in 1918; apocryphally, the Black educator John Hope was told to his face, casually and ostensibly politely of course, by a White Yankee officer: "We didn't sign up after Baltimore to help niggers, we signed up after Baltimore to kill us some crackers." [1]

The behavior of the Yankee occupation forces belied as much; particularly in places such as northwestern Mississippi or central Georgia, once the war was over, the bands of freedmen militias often rarely saw American soldiers, and when they did they were typically ignored, though it varied from District to District; the more infamous Harbord had begun cracking down on the Negro paramilitaries by the end of 1918, whereas elsewhere they continued to enjoy free reign. With the passage of the Third Amendment, however, came a noticeable sea change in the tenor of the occupation; over the course of the autumn of 1918, Yankee soldiers began to end rural patrols almost altogether, first the horseback patrols that had seen so many mounts shot or injured, then the ones by car over Dixie's notoriously poor and underbuilt road network. In December, small towns not only rail networks in Georgia were evacuated of occupation forces, leaving them to local sheriffs and hillboy gangs; Alabama, Florida and South Carolina would follow suit in February the next year.

Freedmen paras didn't know it yet, but the United States had begun to shift the focus of its occupation to keeping cities secure as ports from which to bring in supplies - and export the raw materials which the Confederacy owed them as part of their severe war reparations - rather than the full-force direct securing of entire towns and rural counties across Dixie. There was a variety of reasons for this, the first being that part of the understanding at Mount Vernon had been that every concession the Confederate government acceded to and performed as promised would be met with a show of good faith by Philadelphia in turn; the passage of the Third Amendment through gritted teeth was nonetheless the Patton-Martin administration making good on its promise that it would do as it had been ordered and pursue the most serious and non-symbolic reform (even if in practical terms there were very few slaves left in actual held bondage by August 1918, though the threat of capture and re-enslavement remained high until then). As such, the Yankees would meet a promise kept with one of their own, and withdraw from major parts of the Confederate interior while keeping cities and rail lines in their hands, and stepping up airplane patrols in an attempt to flush out the NRO from its Tennessee and north Alabama hideaways.

There were other, less benign reasons for the gradual withdrawal starting in late 1918 as well, though. The passage of the Third Amendment may have been uncelebrated in the exhausted and polarized United States, but it did not go unnoticed, and more than a few voices began to ask why, exactly, the occupation was ongoing still, at least to the level it had been. A rumor that conscription agents from the Army were at the stadium caused a riot at the last St. Louis Browns game of the season as a rowdy crowd frustrated by their terrible baseball club nearly burned down two blocks of the city and the Missouri National Guard was called in to keep peace. While most Democrats had not turned on the occupation, questioning the conduct of the Root administration and its management thereof was a common theme on the campaign trail, and that trickled down to many voters who began agitating to "bring our boys back!", and the War Department certainly interpreted the results of the landslide defeat of Liberal candidates across the country as a referendum on the performance of the postwar Army, with the Independence Day Massacres a particular black mark. Ironically, hillboy attacks had, largely, dried up after the Massacres, in part because the Army's counterattacks against them had in fact been relatively successful, though men like Forrest and other NRO commandants remained at large. Still, July 1918 had been a turning of the tide, as had the August passage of the Amendment. By late 1919, it had emerged as bipartisan consensus in Philadelphia that the occupation should begin to wound up, even as many abolitionists and war hawks protested that there had been no movement on the critical Fourth and Fifth Amendments demanded by Mount Vernon, amendments that would actually guarantee the rights of freedmen after the end of bondage.

Filling the void of the American occupation was local state capacity, as county sheriffs and judges and state legislators began to regain some measure of ability to reconstitute their authority, with varying results; Louisiana and North Carolina had restored sophisticated and functional law enforcement and paramilitaries forces loyal to the government by the end of 1918, whereas states like South Carolina remained in a state of long-term anarchy and Virginia and Tennessee saw their legislators acting as little more than mouthpieces for the military administrations in Richmond and Memphis. This was never more on display than in an infamous even known as the Sandhills War, in which the state of North Carolina flexed its muscles and showed why it would be the dominant force in Confederate politics until the early 1930s.

The Sandhills are a region of the Carolinas east of Charlotte and south Raleigh on the approach to the coastal lowland, full of thick pine forests and notoriously poor for the kind of cash crop agriculture on which the state otherwise depended. It had been a popular haunt of runaways since the 1600s, and home to one of Dixie's largest remaining Native tribes in the Lumbee. The Lumbee and freedmen colonies had for years lived in relatively close proximity with some level of mutual assistance, and white power had generally not extended into the area out of respect for the Lumbee, who were known to respond violently to outsiders attempting to enforce state or national laws on their land. The war had broken this longstanding truce, however, what with a flood of freedmen to a swath of land in the Sandhills who, thanks to their proximity to US Marines in Wilmington, were extremely well-armed and equipped and had formed something of a state-within-a-state on both sides of the Carolina state lines and had become the primary enforcers in pursuing and killing hillboys, many of them Lumbee, across Carolina coastal plain. Finally, after months of mounting tensions, on November 25, 1918 a full-scale war broke out between the Lumbee and the so-called Army of the Sandhills, and the Lumbee forces immediately found themselves on the back foot, retreating northwards and suddenly finding a sophisticated Black militia led by a man named Arnold Woods in control of much of southeastern North Carolina.

The state government in Raleigh quickly rallied the Tar Heel Guard, a nickname for the state's militia, and deployed it south first to Fayetteville and then to Lumberton, the heart of Lumbee country. On December 1, they linked up with the Lumbee National Guard, the tribe's chief paramilitary, and struck southeast to break the Army of the Sandhills in two. Hundreds of freedmen fled into Wilmington, but the weight of Woods' forces had the Tar Heels between them and the city. Quick, tactical jabs led by the Guard's commander, Cameron Morrison, [2] kept the freedmen Sandhills Army away from the coast and pincered between his forces and a smaller screening brigade out of Goldsboro, harassing and haranguing the retreating rebels all the way to the shores of Pamlico Sound. All the while, the Marines stayed in their barracks in Wilmington, never once deploying even so much as a group of scouts to observe what was going on.

A survivor of the mass murder of the Sandhills Army on December 13th - a Friday - near New Bern described the ten days leading up to it as "not unlike how cowboys wrangle herds of cattle across a wide range, corralling them into a group, closing of their paths of escape; and in the end, that's what we were, cattle." Chased through the vast, swampy coastal woods between New Bern and Jacksonville, stragglers who were caught by Tar Heels had their hands and feet nailed to trees, so that if they survived - which almost none did - their captors would know where to find them when they came back, if ever. Men on horseback opened fire on fleeing women and children who had been part of Woods' makeshift army and in 1997 a mass grave was found in the Croatan State Forest where twelve young boys, none likelier older than twelve, had been shot several times and buried under a thin layer of dirt and pine needles, lost for eighty years.

Finally, on that infamous "Wet Friday," the remnants of the Sandhills Army was cornered where the Neuse River widened as it turned into the Pamlico Sound. Morrison ordered his men to lower their rifles and instead tightened the noose around the two hundred men and thirty women, some still clasping their babes, stuck on the riverbank, and nudged closer and closer in. Fighting was ended with beatings and shootings, and finally all two hundred were pushed into the river or held under in it, with Morrison shouting at his charges not to "waste a bullet on a nigger!" It was one of the largest mass drownings in North American history not to involve a ship being sunk, and as few as five men survived after pretending to have died and floating ashore downstream.

News of the Sandhills Massacre did not reach the United States for weeks, but when it did, it engendered little but a shrug; it was just another slaughter after two full years of them going on across Dixie. The US Marines had been under strict orders not to engage official agents of the state of North Carolina, and that was the excuse bandied around for their non-intervention in the massacre. But as a first chapter, it was an ominous one; the state capacity of the Confederacy was still extraordinarily limited, and would be for years, but as early as late 1918, in the shadow of the Third Amendment, it was already being returned to doing what it had done best since the War of Secession - being used to suppress the liberty and physical safety of peope of color and enforcing the strict hierarchies of white supremacy..."

- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy

[1] I felt censoring out half of the offending word here would deprive this quote of its power, so my apologies.
[2] One of the chief perpetrators of the OTL 1898 Wilmington massacre/putsch

 

[KingSweden24]

"...broached the most uncomfortable question in Brazilian politics on November 27, 1918, when it was asked clearly: who, in the whole of the Imperio, actually enjoyed the confidence of the public while also holding credibility with the powerful landed establishment and military?

Nascimiento Vargas discovered rudely that it was not he, upon the defeat of his emancipation law by the Chamber of Deputies. The vote was excruciatingly narrow, with three votes sufficient to change the outcome and with it likely the course of Brazilian history. But alas, on that day, 52 deputies voted nay, and 49 voted aye, and Vargas announced upon its defeat his resignation from the floor of the House of Deputies as his allies cried out in alarm and despair. Many of those who voted down the bill had done so because it was neither graduated nor compensated; proponents of the bill had denounced the idea of compensating slaveowners for slaves in their mid-forties as being utterly absurd, especially as the practice was on "borrowed time" with the march of aging from the Law of Free Birth continuing on.

The truth of the matter was that for Vargas, the defeat of his Law of Emancipation was simply the last straw. Rio de Janeiro saw almost weekly protests, riots and street fights between rival "veterans advocates" who were usually just unemployed, bored and angry and covered their ennui with violence and aesthetics of politics. Policy was nonexistent, and the General Assembly a vipers' den of rivalry, intrigue and subterfuge; assassinations and attempted assassinations were common, with a gunman even attempting to open fire upon Vargas in the House of Deputies itself just two weeks earlier. The job was thankless and bordering on impossible, and Vargas was unwilling to embarrass himself any longer.

This left Brazil adrift, again. Luis I, advised by a number of prominent aristocratic statesmen and the crucial Dom Leopoldo Augusto, chose not to call fresh elections just a year after the previous edition, fearing yet even further political displacement. In the past several months, a populist outfit led by former Admiral Isaias de Noronha had emerged, supported by street hoodlums referred to as the Verdes and calling themselves the Associacao Nacionalista with a focus on rebuilding Brazilian national pride through an unapologetic "pursuit," as Noronha called it, of the "pessimist tendency." What this meant exactly was left intentionally vague, but the brutal violence deployed by Noronha's legions of underemployed thugs left little to guess. That Noronha was at the head of such a movement was in and of itself partially concerning; if the former "lifeboat admiral" whose flagship had been sunk at Hilton Head could stand atop a rising wave of aggressive populism, then somebody with much more public credibility could do so, too.

Luis was refused by his cousin Dom Leopoldo Augusto, however; Nilo Pecanha and Delfim Moreira were experienced statesmen but both in terrible health, forcing them each to tearfully decline. Lauro Muller was too associated with the wartime government of Pinheiro Machado, a man who would only serve to provoke if appointed to government again. This left Luis with a figure whom he was reluctant to call upon, but could still command a cabinet once more of technocrats; Venceslaus Bras, a conservative but one who had not irritated too many people. Nonetheless, the debacle to close out 1918 proved yet again that the efforts of the establishment to sustain themselves represented nothing more than a rotating cast of the same aristocrats, and the military's grouchiest figures, still smarting from the defenestration of Fonseca, began to see Noronha as a potential alternative and increasingly became a pillar of his support, rather than attempting to block his ascent..."

- For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism

 

[KingSweden24]

"...outer boundaries of what an "Alemist" foreign policy might look like; indeed, it was one that Argentine had subtly carried out for years. Though their influence over Uruguay had collapsed entirely, Argentina had rather deepened her ties with Paraguay dramatically, and the Alemist influence upon the Azules who had emerged victorious from that country's long and fractious civil conflicts in the previous twenty years looked an awful lot like the crumbling Civic Union. Eduardo Schaerer had been the first President in Paraguyan history to complete his mandate without a coup and while he was succeeded by a fellow Liberal in the young and more radical Jose Pedro Montero, it was nonetheless a peaceful transfer of power from one President to another after an election regarded as mostly free of irregularities. Schaerer had strengthened Paraguay's institutions, reformed its military by promoting dozens of young new officers from the educated urban intellectual class rather than scions of the landed oligarchy, and made enormous efforts to improve not only the welfare of Spanish-descended and immigrant peoples, of which there were increasingly many, but also the indigenous Guarani. Secure as a neutral ground that could trade with all combatants during the Great American War, cottage industries had sprung up across Paraguay, and Asuncion's position had left it an important forum for diplomacy.

If the influence of Alemist thinking over Paraguay and the Radicals of Chile was clear, it was less so in Bolivia, which was rapidly charging the opposite direction under its own Liberal Party, which represented the more laissez-faire and oligarchic school of 19th century liberalism in contrast to the radicalism en vogue elsewhere in the Cone. Ismael Montes had ridden his 1915 triumph at Lima in securing the Littoral Province for Bolivia once again to a crushing success in the mid-term Congressional vote, one which was allegedly highly fraudulent and used the military to intimidate illiterate native voters, and thereafter set about purging Bolivia's small and already corrupt bureaucracy of his enemies while promoting military friends favorable to him and bullying the Church into silence. This all culminated in the election of Jose Gutierrez Guerra, a wealthy and powerful La Paz banker who had only just been elected to Congress in 1914 and seemed to have emerged out of nowhere to succeed Montes; in part due to the assassination of former general and opposition leader Jose Manuel Pando, there was no way to have a truly free election in Bolivia, especially after nearly twenty years of Liberal control of the country.

Had the Littoral not been returned at the conclusion of a stirring military victory over the hated Chileans, Gutierrez's time may have been quite unstable and could well have ended "early," as so many Latin American Presidencies often did. But the afterglow of Lima was still strong, and Bolivians had in the years after the return of the Littoral seen a dramatic rise in living standards (at least in cities like La Paz, which were booming); unlike the severe and increasingly chronic economic malaise that had plagued most of South America since 1915-16, Bolivia seemed to be in the midst of a golden age, one that made Gutierrez confident enough to make noises that he intended to break from Montes and pursue a number of genuine public works projects through the fattened treasury.

In some cases, however, Gutierrez was very much like Montes, such as in Bolivia's increasing interest in the Chaco. The area has in the high plateaus of western Paraguay, claimed by both countries, arid and seemingly worthless until the suggestion in late 1918 by a number of geologists that it could in fact enjoy high levels of mineral wealth, in particular oil; Bolivia, with its large mining industry, was even more interested in those lands than it had ever been before. Of course, the biggest problem with their mounting claims over the Chaco, buffeted by Bolivian confidence bordering on arrogance after their war with Chile, was that the Chaco covered more than half of Paraguay's claimed borders, and for a country that had a grievously traumatic 19th century, Paraguay was not about to see its territories further reduced and Bolivian armies permanently stationed across from Asuncion.

The tensions thus rising, Argentinean policymakers saw a familiar story to the one in Uruguay at the start of the decade, and this time they were determined they would not see another country gradually moving towards progressivism be bullied by a larger neighbor into surrender..."

- The Radical Republic

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Maximilian and Carlota attended private Christmas services in the Chapultepec's imperial chapel rather than the cathedral down upon the Zocalo below, and at a grand family dinner on Christmas Day, he was noted by many - Margarita Clementina, her two elder sons, a number of palace guards - to have been more chipper than they had seen him in quite some time. Grandchildren sat in his lap, and he regaled everyone with stories of the poorer, more agrarian Mexico he and Carlota had found, and then the story of their voyage to the New World, and the half-finished construction of their palace Miramare on the Adriatic, which he had never been able to enjoy. It was a sweet moment but one even Louis Maximilian found strange, for he had never heard his father speak with such yearning for Europe or to "swim below Miramare" so much before.

Maximilian and Carlota went to bed, separately, on the night of December 27th. One of the Emperor's nurses came in to check on him shortly before midnight and found him peacefully sleeping, with a smile on his face. When another attendant came early in the morning, Maximilian of Mexico had expired, still smiling, hands clasped over his chest, his eyes closed and his chin resting gently on his chest, propped up by the pillow. The nurse made the sign of the cross and out of superstition placed her crucifix in his hands, and then called for help: the Emperor was dead, long live the Emperor.

News of Maximilian's passing, aged eighty-six, quickly spread not just throughout the Chapultepec and the other palaces of the royal family, but through Mexico. Church bells rang, and people wept openly in the streets. Vigils erupted across the country, with paintings of the Emperor that looked almost like religious icons a common sight at them. Women wore black well into 1919; churches swelled with attendees praying for the late Emperor's soul, and units of soldiers proactively began riding with a horse that was saddled with two empty boots in the stirrups. Unlike the Imperial family, which had seen his physical decline even as he remained mostly mentally astute, most Mexicans knew Maximilian only as a symbol - a symbol of national strength, of national virility, and of peace and prosperity.

The grieving for Maximilian was thus not just the loss of a man, but the loss of something more than a man - the Padre de Patria, the father of the country. Maximilian had taken a country beset by civil war and a rotating cast of alternating reformist and reactionary Presidents at one another's throats and modernized it, healed it, made it a co-equal of other powers on the continent. He had ended one conflict and survived another, and Mexico had escaped the Great American War with more dignity than any co-belligerent. In the meantime, the Mexico he left behind was not the Mexico of poverty but rather an increasingly modern one, with bustling cities, factories, railroads, and increasingly aircraft to travel across its vastness. The people of Mexico shuddered to think what their country would be like had he not come along, or if it would even be intact in its current borders what with such rapacious neighbors as those they had.

The funeral would be arranged for late January, but for much of Mexico, all of 1919 was one long funeral, an uncertain hour for what awaited their country, a grim gaze towards the horizon and a future that, after an Emperor who had been on the throne for fifty-six years, so long no Mexican really remembered a Mexico without him, would be strange and unfamiliar to every citizen, in a time and world that through new technologies and ideas was already unrecognizable almost by the year. Mexico's great bridge to the 19th century was at last gone; what loomed beyond, for Mexico at least, remained now in the hands of his son and grandsons.

Maximilian, after all, had done his duty to Mexico and to his family - and with that, with his familiar smile, he had earned his long-awaited and well-deserved rest."

- Maximilian of Mexico

End of Part XI: From These Ashes, Nothing Grows​

 

[KingSweden24]

Part XII - This is the Way the World Ends​

"...and so they stepped gladly out into the abyss, refusing to look at the inky dark beneath them, their hearts yearning for glory as their heads screamed with rage, and into that abyss with them followed the whole of central Europe, a halcyon past vanishing from view as they plunged forward, never to return..."

- 1919: How Europe Went to War

 

[KingSweden24]

Maximilian I of Mexico (born Archduke Maximilian of Austria; full name, German: Ferdinand Maximilian Josef Maria von Habsburg-Lothringen; 6 July 1832 - 28 December 1918) was the first Emperor of the Second Mexican Empire, reigning informally between 1862 and 1863 until his formal coronation that year, and then until his death in December of 1918. He was an Austrian archduke, the younger brother of Franz Josef I of Austria-Hungary, and had governed the Italian provinces on his brother's behalf before his invitation by a collective of Mexican conservative monarchists and their French allies to serve as Emperor.

The Second Empire was established in the midst of the French Intervention, a war in which France invaded Mexico in the spring of 1862 and rapidly advanced upon Mexico City that May, defeating the Liberal Republic of Benito Juarez (and indeed successfully killing Juarez in the field shortly thereafter) and electing to import a European monarch to unify the fractious state into a single Empire. Maximilian's first years in Mexico were thus wracked by civil war, and Mexican foreign policy was largely dictated by the French. Mexico became one of the first countries to recognize the Confederate States, and it relied on Confederate intervention to finally defeat rebellions in her north.

Following the conclusion of these insurgencies, Maximilian turned the bulk of his attention to statebuilding, his greatest legacy today. Referred to later as the "Meiji of Mexico," Maximilian attracted millions in European investments into Mexican infrastructure and industry, developing the railroads and ports of the country and making it a critical transit point for goods east-west from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He dismayed many of his conservative supporters in governing as a liberal, though he relied heavily on Catholic institutions for much of his support; he encouraged the use of indigenous languages, opened Mexico up to mass immigration from Europe, and over the decades promulgated a number of new constitutional reforms that greatly liberalized Mexican politics. By the time of his death, Mexico was the second-most developed Latin American state, behind only Argentina, with a thriving middle class in its urban heartland and a robust civil society.

However, many aspects of Maximilian's rule were highly controversial. Efforts to centralize Mexican administration triggered a three-year civil war between 1882-85 known as the Revolt of the Caudillos, in which localist warlords grouped together to fight for their privileges against the authority of Mexico City. As Maximilian's rule advanced, his day-to-day participation in governance diminished as he pivoted to a more constitutional figurehead role, and in the early 1900s Mexican politics became an ugly contest between liberals such as Jose Limantour, conservatives such as Enrique Creel, and radicals such as Francisco Madero. The destabilization of Mexican politics, particularly after the elections of 1907, eventually saw first the election of Madero, and then his effective overthrow in the midst of a financial crisis in 1913 which badly poisoned Mexican parliamentarianism for years to come. This occurred on the eve of rising tensions with the United States, and Mexico was, partly against Maximilian's better judgement, dragged into the Great American War alongside the Confederate States, a war in which Mexico would lose close to two hundred thousand men and suffer severe domestic riots and disturbances, as well as an American invasion of Baja California and its northeast. The war ended with the overthrow of the conservative Cabinet by the chief of the Army General Staff, Bernardo Reyes, who installed himself thereafter as an effective dictator and purged his enemies; Maximilian shortly thereafter acquiesced to a regency led by his son and heir, Louis Maximilian, until his death a year later.

In Mexico, Maximilian I is, with the exception of republican elements, regarded as the Padre de Patria, the father of the country, who ended four decades of chaos post-independence and built the state into not only a functional polity but a growing, increasingly wealthy one with a rising standard of literacy and living. Numerous roads and public facilities throughout the country bear his name, and he is generally regarded as the most important and venerated figure in Mexican history alongside Miguel Hidalgo. His birthday, July 6, has since 1932 been celebrated as a national holiday.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...among the most important pieces of legislation passed by an Australian government; indeed, almost unamended today, the Commonwealth Electoral Act served to fundamentally reshape Australian governance for good.

Beyond the small and obvious tweak of extending a parliamentary term from three years to four - inviting the beginning of an eighty-four year, uninterrupted cadence of quadrennial elections beginning in the fall of 1921 until the "election that came early" of 2008 - what Hughes did that was truly revolutionary was his shifting Australia to the process of single-transferable vote, known at that time as the alternate vote, which was intended to smooth out some of the problems inherent with a system that at that time used first-past-the-post in the nature of other Westminster democracies. This was sold as an egalitarian change - in a "FPTP" system with three major parties, it was thought to produce more stable majorities without wasting votes - but in many ways was intended to solidify Labor, a result that between the act's passage in 1919 and the watershed elections of 1989 the system produced much more often than not.

Key to this "Hughes system," as it came to be known before long, was the Prime Minister's keen sense of what divided Reform and Liberal. There were a great many members of Reform who were socially conservative but economically interventionist to support agricultural prices, and they were gettable as a second vote to keep the "party of bankers" out of power; conversely, many Labor voters in marginal seats were just as hostile to Liberal economic orthodoxy that they would second-preference Reform if necessary. The alternative vote, thus, quickly served to relegate the Liberals to near-permanent third-party status; they would not lead a government again until 1981, and saw their role primarily as one propping up either Labor or Reform (or after 1926, National) governments in return for policy concessions. At the same time, many Liberals - urban and socially moderate - were turned off by Reform's ardent agrarianism and voted for moderate Labor candidates in marginal seats, preventing Reform from building an appeal to the Australian city at a time when they could have otherwise likely absorbed Liberals wholesale.

Thus the vote splitting of before became a more subtle triangulation by Labor against her two rivals, locking in a considerable advantage in both the Commons and the Senate, and allowing Hughes to take the next step of building an ever-more sophisticated electoral machine through which to deliver patronage to loyal Labor divisions and fine-tune his operation into one of the most dominant in the democratic, industrial world..."

- The Little Welshman: Billy Hughes and the Founding of Australia's Labor Dynasty

 

[KingSweden24]

"...formal protest by Texan Secretary of State Andrew Jackson Houston, whom it was lost on few was making moves to burnish his own credentials ahead of the 1919 Presidential election to succeed Gore. With one of the state's most golden surnames thanks to his father Sam's legacy, Houston saw little downside and a considerable opening for himself within the Republican Party to "seize the ring" ahead of September's polls, especially with a fair deal of skepticism that either Sheppard or Garner would be willing to leave their plum positions in Congress to serve in the fairly weak Presidency. The gambit worked for Houston, who would indeed be selected by the Republican "presidential caucus" that July and win a landslide in September against minimal organized opposition as Texas' path towards a single-party democracy became clearer, but it did not necessarily work for Texas writ large.

The Second Republic's severance from the Confederacy through bloodshed had left its economy in tatters, and the Texas dollar, understandably, lacked much of anything to back it; the years after the war were characterized both by a huge speculative run on land by Americans, Canadians and a great many Confederates as well as hyper-inflation as Texas printed huge amounts of fiat currency, which only served to exacerbate the land run due to concerns that prices would not stay the same for long. Accordingly, many of the brave young Texans who had fought in the Republican Army to drive Ferguson's Loyalists across the Sabine were now unemployed or unable to make much of what little work they had, and a drop in the price of oil, beef and timber in 1918 as the North American economic depression worsened only served to further gut the Texan economy. Food riots were common, "outlanders" were lynched with some frequency, and by mid-1919 Gore, in one of his last major acts as President, was forced to suspend the issuance of the near-worthless Texas dollar and introduce a new currency, the Texas credit, which was on the gold standard, instantly depressing the country further. (The dollar would of course be re-issued again as early as 1923).

As tens of thousands of people, mostly single men and a great many of them Black freedmen fleeing the Confederacy or Mexican seasonal workers returning to prewar employment patterns, streamed into Texas, tens of thousands streamed out, in particular across the Red River into Sequoyah. In sharp contrast to the Texas of the late 1910s and early 1920s which was undergoing a crippling series of economic crises, Sequoyah on the other hand had begun to enjoy the dividends of peace by the turn of the decade, with the oilfields of Tulasah making the Osage and Cherokee tribes in its vicinity among the richest people per capita on earth, a wealth they distributed throughout their tribe via the indigenous precepts of communal land ownership and rights. The Tulasah of 1919, the "oil capital of the world," was a shimmering city undeterred by the sharp drop in oil prices in 1917-18, with new buildings and streets popping up every day to support the waves of men arriving there on six-month, typically non-renewable contracts to work, be paid in American money, and then go home; the practical knowledge of these "Sequoyah Boys" from Texas during the Texas oil boom of the 1920s would be invaluable.

The contracts were generally non-renewable because, in order to preserve communal ownership (and tribal political hegemony), Sequoyah was fiercely (and considering the history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, understandably) opposed to temporary workers staying on their lands. Members of other Sequoyahn tribes were generally prohibited from personal land title within other nations; for foreigners, it was completely out of the question, especially in the oil-rich Osage Hills. The vast tenements of Tulasah were thus never considered to be anything other than transient. This was not necessarily the case, however, in central and western Sequoyah, territory where "reserved land" for freedmen and white men had been opened up in the Treaty of Kansas City, particularly in a patch of central Sequoyah that today is home to Sequoyah City, the country's largest (and most ethnically diverse) city. This was in part due to the disinterest of the Six Nations in this land itself, and also in part due to American pressure that anticipated a need for freedmen to have somewhere to go and not wanting that to be entirely within their own borders; it just so happened that one of the main territories "reserved" for white men was largely co-extant with "Greer Country," the territory between the North and South Forks of the Red River that had been disputed between Texas and the Indian Territory for generations, but which Richmond had, previously, never bothered to resolve, in part due to the land's remoteness from population centers in both.

By 1919, however, Greer Country was home to close to thirty thousand people, almost exclusively white and the vast majority born and raised either there or across the South Fork in Texas. They were not the remittance workers of Tulasah's tenement housing but rather farmers, ranchers, and homesteaders; they were families who had established local schools and, quite critically, believed very much that their land was Texan soil. The ability of Sequoyahn reserve settlements to execute their own laws was fundamental to the Sequoyah Constitution and the Treaty of Kansas City (a circumstance that would be critical upon the discovery of oil in Sequoyah City's vicinity in the late 1920s), and so the "Greerites" had a genuine grievance over the decision of the Chickasaw Rangers to pursue suspected horse rustlers into their territory and hang them extrajudicially on the side of the road.

The Greer Country Dispute may have had its immediate origin in that March 1919 incident in one of the most remote corners of the North American interior, but something else would have triggered it eventually; Texas had her claims, and just needed a reason to exercise them. In lodging such an angry protest, Houston made sure that Texas' voice was heard on a matter of foreign policy for the first time, acting as one of many of a concert of nations in North America. However, in being heard, one also earns a response, and the response from Tahlequah was a cold one. The Council of Chiefs was bitter enough about the extraterritoriality afforded to American citizens; they would hear nothing of the same for Texans, which was essentially how they understood the grievance of Greer Country. Furthermore, even had they wanted to cede Greer Country to Texas (which some were open to, if for no other reason than to shed themselves of a troublesome corner of Sequoyah), their foreign policy was dictated exclusively by the United States and they were forbidden from entering bilateral agreements with other sovereign states. Philadelphia was sympathetic to Greer Country's white settlers for purely racial reasons, but was unwilling to entertain border revisions so soon after the conclusion of the Great American War; though their peace treaty recognizing Texas had established diplomatic relations, it had not said anything about recognizing specific borders of Texas, whereas its protectorate with Sequoyah explicitly mentioned defending its territorial integrity. In the view of American policymakers, on which there was bipartisan consensus, those who settled in Greer Country enjoyed the privileges of a reserve land but they had settled in Sequoyah with eyes open and if they wanted to be Texans, they were welcome to return to Texas.

As such, Houston's lodged complaint and subsequent presidency marked the beginning of two important factors in Texan history - one, its dispute with Sequoyah over the exact border along the Red River, and downstream from that, its uneasy relationship with the United States, which would become increasingly complicated as its economic domination by American capital intensified over the decades to come..."

- Republic Reborn

 

[KingSweden24]

"...and with that speech, Ahmet Riza had totally announced himself to the public, [1] and Sabahaddin had for the first time since sweeping to prominence and power a genuine rival who could appeal to the Ottoman street and intelligentsia alike.

What made Riza lethal to Sabahaddin's increasingly tenuous hold on power, however, was not just the credentials and oratory of the man himself, impressive as he was, but the fact that in so publicly denouncing the Treaty of Balta Liman he struck a chord with a frustrated Ottoman street, and that in his views he was exactly the kind of moderate who could actually eat into Sabahaddin's base. Riza had been a vicious foe of Abdulhamid to the point of multiple Parisian exiles, but he was also an Ittihadi who was a liberal democrat and strong believer in constitutionalism. For the emergent Muslim middle class across much of Rumelia and western Anatolia, he was exactly the type of figure who appealed to their sensibilities without, as Sabahaddin had often done, pandering to Greek, Armenian and Jewish constituencies in a way that many Turks and Kurds found unbecoming nor indulging in the kind of ultra-conservative piousness that many of them felt belonged in the previous century. And in Balta Liman, Riza had found the ultimate effigy to burn - the very real downsides of unfettered liberalism.

The Treaty of Balta Liman's parameters were straightforward - in return for supporting the Porte in 1838 at a time of severe crisis during the invasion from Egypt by Muhammad Ali, Britain had demanded all economic monopolies be disbanded, and that Ottoman protectionism against British goods be forever ceased. While many other bilateral agreements in the years since 1838 had opened Ottoman markets - notably ones with France and Germany - the unilateralism of Balta Liman, and the fact that the British had not once renegotiated it since and been one of the largest benefactors of the reviled OPDA, made it an unusually unpopular piece of foreign policy. By 1919, with the Ottoman economy slouching back into recession after several years of strong growth and wealthier working and middle classes left frustrated by the sudden and sharp downturn, it became a shibboleth, denounced by many Ittihadis (though not Riza himself, at least not in those terms) as the "Crime of 1838." A straight line was drawn from Balta Liman to the "cultural revolution" of the 1910s Empire, to the disposition of the fez hat and hijab by women, and the rapid secularization of the state's functions even as the Sultan proudly invoked his title as Caliph. The conservative backlash was brewing, and despite his own religious moderation, Riza was well-positioned to ride it, especially if he could appeal to a non-sectarian audience with a new proposal - the repeal of Balta Liman.

Sabahaddin was an Anglophile, but no fool, and even he had begrudgingly come around to the idea that Balta Liman left the Ottomans "supine." His nationalism had been flexed in eliminating the OPDA and he could do so again, he figured, trusting his relationship with the British. Those efforts in the spring of 1919 would prove stillborn fast, however. Britain's ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Roger Percival Smythe-Watson [2], refused outright to "entertain" the renegotiation of a treaty that, in his words, "formed the firmament of Anglo-Turkish relations as much as the Kuwait Protocol." With London well aware of the deterioration of Ottoman relations with France and Austria, and ever-present concerns about Italian ambitions in the Balkans as well as Russia, the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom saw little incentive to pursue a course that gave up all their advantages over Constantinople and removed a great deal of leverage. Sabahaddin was similarly cut off at the knees by Ahraris who were not just secular progressives but doctrinaire economic liberals, wholly committed to Anglophilic concepts of free trade as being the purest expression of human liberty as opposed to the rank conservative protectionism of other European powers; some of them made the absurd attempt to argue that tariffs were a form a usury, and thus haram, despite being men who otherwise scoffed at the idea of grounding Ottoman law in Islam.

The crisis of 1919 between the Great Powers of central Europe even failed to provide a needed distraction; Sabahaddin's failure to pursue a revision of Balta Liman was held up in the press as evidence of the failure of "national modernism," that for all his efforts Sabahaddin was yet another weak Ottoman figure bullied by Europeans. As France and Austria went to war with Germany and Italy, the multinational but primarily British concern that was developing a tunnel beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul suddenly collapsed, delaying the completion of the project until well into the early 1930s and becoming another symbolic blow. The Ottoman economy, despite the OPDA being dissolved, was dependent not only on British imports but British money to do much of anything; uneven industrialization and a deepening economic malaise only heightened this anger for those who were well-read enough to understand it.

As such, the quick decline of Sabahaddin's years in power was at hand. He was now a plodding conservative and moderate sellout to the radicals in his movement who found that national modernism was not moving rapidly enough in instilling a secular multicultural (and utopian) polity, while to conservatives he was the same dangerous and naive revolutionary he had always been, but to all his enemies he was now also a weakling who could not - or perhaps refused to - challenge his beloved Britian over Balta Liman and defend Ottoman national interests. The blood was in the water, spurred as Sabahaddin suspected by the paranoid Sultan Yusuf I who perpetually feared an Ahrari coup against him, and though he noted in his diaries that the opposition to Balta Liman was clearly totemic, it was nonetheless valuable to all those who had, after close to a decade, found much to oppose in his political and cultural project, and were finally coalescing in a way that genuinely threatened it..."

- The House of Osman

[1] Ahmet Riza is an interesting late-Ottoman figure OTL. He was a Young Turk, but an Anglophile and an opponent of the Three Pashas' policies regarding ethnic and religious minorities, who later became an ardent Kemalist. Here, he fits well into the "soft CUP" Ittihad Party, and was one of the more capable men to emerge from that current of Turkish nationalism. He's an obvious foil/opponent to a man like Sabahaddin (they had a courteous but oppositional relationship IRL), and one wonders what may have become of the OE had men like Ahmet Riza been in charge in 1911-14 rather than Enver Pasha and his fellow thugs.
[2] Fictional just wanted to come up with a silly, stereotypically British name

 

[KingSweden24]

"...to the average Irishman, one could have questioned whether anything had much changed at all. A British flag still flew at the Four Courts and Dublin Castle; the Royal Irish Constabulary still patrolled the streets. But change had indeed come, and it occurred on February 11, 1919 - today celebrated as Ireland Day or, in some parlances, Dominion Day, one of Ireland's most important national public holidays. It was on February 11 that the Assembly of Ireland, the new bicameral legislature, was convened, with Joseph Devlin at the head of its government as the transitional council fully dispersed. In a move of profound symbolism, Devlin chose to call into session the Assembly of Ireland at Parliament House, the home of the pre-1800 Irish legislature, which had since then been used as a bank; this was meant to be a temporary location, and indeed was, for within months the Assembly would be renting the larger Leinster House from the Royal Dublin Society as they debated where to site a new, permanent home for both Houses of the Assembly which they could over time grow into.

Devlin joked, "As we were saying, before we were interrupted," in the first words of his address to the Assembly, eliciting a number of cheers and polite applause, a celebration of Irish parliamentarianism returning after over a century suspended. Street fairs erupted across the island, with businesses closing to celebrate, church bells ringing in anticipation, and even fireworks being launched over the Dublin quays. But Ireland Day was just one day, and it was the day for mirth; there was a tomorrow, after all, and it would be the day after, and the day after that, in which the true hard work of state building began to loom. To what extent was this new Kingdom of Ireland going to eschew its roots as a subsidiary of the British Empire? What kind of relationship would it have with London, which in theory controlled her foreign policy? If Ireland was now co-equal with Canada or Australia, what did that say about Ireland, since those two dominions had begun as colonies? This question, in particular, was an uncomfortable one for Irish nationalists to grapple with.

It was also the case that despite Devlin's Ulster roots and his overtures of magnanimity - he denounced a group of former IRB men who tried to lower the British Union Jack and replace it with St. Patrick's Saltire on the very first day - the Protestant minority in the north was deeply worried about what was to come. The British Army was still barracked on the island, the police still the RIC, and their flag still flew, but how long would these things last? Small-scale violence simmered across Ulster in February and March of 1919, with St. Patrick's Day a particularly violent one even with the internal conflict over. It was after all just five years earlier that the Curragh Mutiny had been staged and had for a brief moment seemed to suggest that Ulster would bring down the power of the British government to protect its interests, and now it was governed not by London but by Dublin directly. Times had changed, rapidly, and there was great trepidation in Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere about what exactly Ireland would look like five years hence..."

- Ireland Unleashed

 

[KingSweden24]

United Kingdom general election, 1919​

TOTAL (670):

National Conservative: 258 (+70)
Liberal: 314 (+11)
New Conservative: 0 (-6)
Social Democratic Labour Party: 98 (+24)
Irish Unionist: 0 (-22)
Irish Parliamentary: 0 (-58)
Sinn Fein: 0 (-10)
Irish Republican: 0 (-7)
Irish Labour: 0 (-2)

----

"...shortly after his electoral defeat in 1949, when asked to name some of the greatest own goals in British political history, the outgoing Prime Minister Sir Archie Sinclair smiled ruefully and listed the most obvious of all: the decision by his fellow Liberal, Austen Chamberlain, to call a snap election in late February of 1919 upon the "evacuation from Westminster" of Ireland. Sinclair did not hold up other contemporary cases such as the elder Chamberlain's "tariff election" or the failure of the Curzon government over the Education Act 1910, because those were electoral setbacks (or losses) grounded, at the very least, in an attempt to effect policy. No, 1919 stood head and shoulders above all other electoral debacles if for no other reason than that it was wholly unnecessary and a moment of uncharacteristic ego on the part of Chamberlain.

The House of Commons had six hundred and seventy seats for Members of Parliament, of which ninety-nine had been at the 1918 polls reserved for Ireland. As the date upon which Irish removal from the Commons drew closer, it became a spirited debate within the Commons what should be done to adjust for this coming transition. The obvious solution to many was to simply deduct those seats permanently (or for the time being) from the Commons, keeping the constituencies across Britain the same and reducing the House to five hundred and seventy-one MPs. This would have had the straightforward result, too, of delivering the Liberals a majority government that they currently did not possess, which would have allowed Chamberlain to govern effectively well into the 1920s until he had to call another election.

However, the size of the Commons was governed by statute, and the drawing of its constituencies had been partly influenced by the Nationals in the Curzon years; the "Full House" cadre of Liberals, making up a plurality of the party's thinking and including Chamberlain, argued that reallocating those ninety-nine seats across Britain would inevitably add dozens of new seats in Liberal-friendly urban areas while compacting National-friendly agrarian regions. Over the course of the autumn of 1918, despite a flagging British economy and war fears rising rapidly on the continent after the Hofburg Affair, the Chamberlain ministry became grievously divided on the Full House Question, as its proponents increasingly talked themselves into it. Finally, Chamberlain agreed to the full reallocation, and gave an address on November 29th to the Commons introducing the act and declaring that a new election was necessary with the "historic constitutional shift" in the "nature of the composition of this House." The Electoral Act 1919, which was passed in the second week of January, redistributed new constituencies that were equal in population and geographically compact, but which seemed to have suspiciously drawn borders in a few crucial areas that seemed to benefit the Liberals exclusively in marginal areas. The act, and the calling of the election, were both hugely unpopular with Nations and Socialists alike, and a strong minority of the Liberal grassroots protested the move as well. This opposition would, it turn out, prove prescient.

For the second time in a year, Britain went to the polls; for the second time in a year, Liberals gained a strong minority government. However, at 314 seats, the Liberals were well short of the dominating majority that Chamberlain had assumed they would inherit by virtue of Irish peace. The vast majority of the "reallocation" as it came to be known was won by resurgent Nationals powered by their new, gruff leader Sir Walter Long (who was a gentry landowners and firm agrarian who helped the Nationals sweep much of rural England and Scottish districts once considered Liberal strongholds), who had purged most of the Hughligan faction from leadership; the SDLP, for its part, closed in just shy of a hundred seats, what would be their best result until 1936.

The 1919 elections thus, at first glance, changed little; the Liberals remained the largest party, tantalizingly close to a majority, and they remained dependent on the confidence of Barnes and the SDLP, thus foreclosing on any serious shifts to the right in Liberal policy. It was nonetheless perceived nationally as a debacle, a decision by Chamberlain to make a gamble he was unsure he had the cards to win and call an election of choice. Constitutionally, it may have been the right choice considering the sea change that Ireland's departure from the Commons represented; politically, it was poorly thought out, especially as the British public gazed nervously at the conflict that would explode on the continent within weeks and Chamberlain was pilloried in National-friendly press and even amongst many Socialists as making autocratic maneuvers that would have made his own father blush.

For once, Chamberlain had tried his hand at ruthlessness; and the only time he tried it, it badly misfired..." [1]

- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-24

[1] My thinking here was that the government really does need to debate how to address Ireland's evacuation from the Commons, and I was inspired a bit by the early 2021 Canadian general election that Trudeau called just for shits and giggles and it wound up just sorta not doing anything for him, only here it goes more than a bit worse for Chamberlain even as his party gains seats on paper.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...veritable who's who of the American progressive movement. There were politicians of all three major parties present, with not only Shafroth for Democrats but also men like George Norris and Gil Hitchcock, as well as Ole Hanson (a Liberal with an idiosyncratic record) and Ed Boyce, the Irish-born Idaho Socialist. Racial advocates such as WEB DuBois and the Confederate-born anti-lynching campaigner Ida Wells were joined by social reformers such as Richard Ely, and all three dined with inventors and scientists well-known in that day.

The Colorado Springs Conference of February 1919 is often held up as one of the most seminal moments in American progressivism, as important as Saratoga Springs was for the suffragette movement, though that perhaps misstates its goals and achievements. In hosting a wide collection of leading luminaries of the day at the Grand Hotel, Shafroth's hope was rather to chart out a "common course," deliberately mimicking Hearstian language from a decade earlier, for progressive activists of all stripes at all levels. It did so, and more. Not only is Colorado Springs to this day the site of a major annual confab of progressive activists and groups - the Colorado Policy Conference, which awards a "Shafroth Prize" by the eponymous foundation - but its legend lies in many of the ideas proposed there for the first time. It was at the ballroom of the Grand Hotel that it was proposed to at long last end barriers to voting, not just in prohibitions on women's ballot (an uncontroversial subject in a state among the first to grant women the franchise) but to curtail impediments such as the levying of poll taxes or the more common new method used in New England (and some Western states, to Shafroth's embarrassment) of literacy tests, ostensibly in the interest of "an informed ballot" but in practice used to prevent naturalized citizens who could speak decent English but perhaps not read as well from voting. Shafroth himself took the temperature of the room on an effort to repeal the electoral college; though modern analysis tends to suggest that this was out of a sense of fairness, it was rather that he viewed it as the logical next step of the efficiency movement and the outspring of the progressive push for primary elections to select candidates, and saw it as archaic and with little value any longer in a day and age where states were considerably less influential and the President enjoyed broader powers than the Founders would have ever anticipated. Other amendments proposed were enshrining labor rights in the constitution, or a ban on child labor in honor of the late Senator John Kern; no idea was too bold or radical, no suggestion laughed out of the room.

As the conference wound down after six days of lively debate, the contours of the legislative agenda that would define the Democratic 1920s was visible, and the seventy-odd attendees were now all on first-name bases with one another. It linked and intermixed people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different faiths, and different political parties and persuasions; the Colorado Springs Conference may not have led to a definitive agenda or an electoral manifesto, but as a gathering for the airing of ideas as a bold new Democratic Congress was seated in Philadelphia and the Root administration slouched into its lame-duck back half, it was a smashing success to which all its participants would look back with fondness..."

- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31

 

[KingSweden24]

1919 Chinese national elections​

Senate of the Republic of China (274 Seats)

Guomindang (Nationalist Party) - 130 Seats (+32)
Jinbudang (Progressive Party) - 123 (-26)
Multi-Party Candidates - 15 (-6)
Independents - 6 (-1)

House of Representatives of the Republic of China (596 Seats)

GMD - 307 Seats (+56)
JBD - 219 Seats (-64)
Independents - 48 Seats (+22)
Multi-Party - 22 Seats (-14)

------------

"...producing what in effect was a divided government and quickly revealing the limitations of Liang Qichao's 1912 constitution, at least insofar as it was able to produce a stable government representative of constitutional democracy. Arguably, that had not been its intent; after all, the Second Republic's leaders were ex-Qing officials of the more moderate half of the establishment who had sought to undo the autocracy of the First Republic without bending to revolutionaries. Mandarins and oligarchs had been replaced by rule of generals and conservative, traditionalist intellectuals, and while this had provided a fair deal of political (and in Shanghai, Canton and to a lesser extent Hankow and Peking, economic) stability, the 1919 elections served to not only validate the Guomindang's political strategy, but its ideological one too in portraying the Second Republic as hopelessly corrupt and contemptuous of the general public.

The Jinbudang government had good reason to be alarmed. Despite fewer than six percent of Chinese citizens being eligible to vote, the Guomindang in the staggered January and February elections had successfully done what they had hoped to do in the last two elections and become the largest party in the House of Representatives, seeing the Jinbudang suffer severe losses and earning an outright majority which, when paired in one-off circumstances with sympathetic multi-party candidates [1] and independents, gave them a commanding position in that body. The Senate was an even more impressive victory; despite the considerable headwinds in individual provinces (such as the Jinbudang's practice of appointing senators "in absentia" from the "lost provinces" of 1901 and the Civil War) the Guomindang was nonetheless able to end the Jinbudang's outright majority and become the largest faction, able to earn majorities through crossover votes more easily than the government. While it was a narrow result there compared to their landslide in the House, the outcome was an utter humiliation for the government, and foretold of a newer, more muscular nationalism. It was argued that the crowds in Canton that met Song Chiao-jen as he addressed raucous supporters may have numbered over a million, a throng so massive that dozens were killed of asphyxiation in the crush. The party's red flag with its blue and white star was flown from buildings in place of the Republic's five-colored banner; marches and demonstrations were held streets not just in the party's bastion of Canton but across China. The factionalism that had assailed the party was no more; left-wing figures such as Liao Chongkai and Wang Chao-ming (who would be better known in the future as Wang Jingwei) stood beside Song, Hu Hanmin on the steps of the National Assembly in Nanking as the new Assembly was convened, publicly insinuating that with this paradigm shift a "third republic" was upon China with the results of the election; Sun Yat-sen, for his part, named the election "the Revolution of Joy" and was, at least for a brief moment, dispelled of his notion that China was not ready for democracy and that the Guomindang would need to "guide" the country there via his Three Principles.

The Second Republic's reputation as the "Parliamentary Republic" was only due to the immense power vested in the Cabinet and its power over legislation, taxation, and all manner of other privileges; this was in part a byproduct of Liang, who had once joined Kang Youwei in advocating a constitutional imperial monarchy, viewing the Presidency of the Republic as a stand-in for the Chinese monarchy. However, one extremely important role vested in the office of the President that was not ceremonial was the exclusive right of the President of China to appoint not only regional governors but the Prime Minister, who in turn would assemble a cabinet of his peers. This had been done to serve as a check on the powers of the National Assembly, making the legislature responsible to the people in triennial elections but looking to the German, French and Russian models for how to appoint the most powerful figure of that government. The Second Republic's founders had intentionally designed their system to benefit what would become the Jinbudang, and they had little interest in changing course on that. While the choice of a provincial governor could be blocked by a simple majority of both houses or a two-thirds majority of Senators from that province and cabinet ministers could be impeached through a somewhat straightforward process, the appointment of a Prime Minister could not be defeated by the legislature, and in that provision lay the seeds of the crisis that would before long consume the Second Republic and bring it to an end.

Following the elections, President Li was left with a dilemma. The Jinbudang's patronage machine had failed it, particularly getting annihilated across much of the South and, increasingly, in Shanghai and Nanking, areas it had hoped would serve as its strongholds. The violence of the 1917 Presidential elections had suggested to him that a victorious Guomindang would mean anarchy and potentially another civil war, opening the door to a Manchurian-Russian re-invasion of China that could credibly threaten Nanking. However, while he was hardly a liberal and strongly supportive of the centralized government, Li was wary of completely ignoring the results of the election. Here he received conflicting advice; Wu Tingfang, a respected figure who was now nearly eighty, declined the potential of replacing his protege Tang Shaoyi as a unity Prime Minister but did propose that such a Cabinet that drew on nonpartisan as well as partisan figures across the Chinese political spectrum be formed. Tang, who was eyeing the Presidency in 1922, disagreed, and found support from the ruthless Minister of Patrol Qian Nengxun in suggesting instead that the government crack down aggressively on the Guomindang's revolutionary cells and aggressively prosecute an effort to curtail "all counter-statal activities." Liang Qichao sought to split the difference - he advised that a nonpartisan Prime Minister be appointed, perhaps the broadly popular Wang Zhanyuan, and that the Guomindang instead of Cabinet be given first say on provincial governors. If they afterwards attempted to stage a general strike or revolution, then they could be crushed.

Li hated both of those suggestions, particularly appointing his rival Wang to serve as Prime Minister, but he viewed his duty to China being that of avoiding an anarchic revolution, and upon the convening of the Assembly, announced that he would relieve Tang Shaoyi as Prime Minister to allow him instead to serve as Foreign Minister in the government of Xu Shichang, one of Liang's closest confidants. The Assembly was stunned - Song had gone so far as to schedule a banquet to celebrate his appointment as Prime Minister. Li attempted to split the difference in offering Song the Ministry of Finance and thus grant the Guomindang powerful influence over the Chinese economy, but Song politely declined. In the letter, which was made public to the Guomindang's lettered base of support, Song stated, "It goes against the precepts of this moment of democratic change to refuse to appoint the choice of the electorate as the government. I will not betray the people's confidence, and I will not paper over this great injustice."

Part of Li's hope in his poorly-planned gambit was to split the famously factional Guomindang in half. Inviting Song, Hu, and other "rightists" into government had been intended to be an olive branch towards a unity Cabinet that would pointedly exclude the "leftists" thought to be close to Sun, who was canny enough to read the tea leaves and immediately head into exile in Tokyo in anticipation of a violent crackdown. But Song did not take the bait. The Guomindang's fiery young leader proposed his own unity cabinet, one in which the Guomindang held two-thirds of the ministries but acknowledged a divided government by reserving the other third, including the powerful Foreign Ministry, for Li's Jinbudang. This too was rebuffed - Li's missives noted bluntly that the President had sole discretion in appointing a Prime Minister, and the executive was "uninterested," in exact words, of "an inexperienced campaigner serving in such a critical role." This justification was nonsense and was understood accordingly, but once again Song refused to take the bait and agitate in the streets; rather, Song announced that the Guomindang would "serve the people from the halls of the Assembly" and "do our constitutional duty."

This did split the Guomindang, though in a way that in the long run benefitted Song. Liao proposed a general strike and was swiftly arrested even in friendly Canton; his arrest sparked street brawls between the Guomindang's paramilitary wing, the friendly Cantonese police, and the national gendarmes of the Republican Army who had been sent south to carry out the arrest. The confinement of Liao and, before long, Wang in the Canton City Prison, which was place under heavy guard and evacuated of non-critical prisoners by Nanking, quickly made both of them heroes to the street, but they could do little from jail. Song, on the other hand, relished in his role as the chief of an embittered and aggrieved democratic opposition, which defeat legislation sometimes arbitrarily and vetoed provincial governors at will. Making clear his opposition to violent resistance, Song gave Li little opening to have him arrested, and a truly apocalyptic confrontation was avoided.

Nonetheless, the Second Republic had been fatally wounded. The demonstrations against Li and his "hatchet man" Qian intensified into a mass movement on May 4th, [2] when across China hundreds of thousands gathered to demand the appointment of a democratic government and, in a more nationalistic vein, demand that China take advantage of the eruption of the Central European War and "undo" the humiliations of 1901 by seizing European concessions and treaty ports. The protesters were hardly the poor working class but rather university students, Western-educated merchants, and other members of the Chinese literati, and the explosion in left-colored nationalism that flowed out from the March 4th Movement became the underpinning of the next several years, a time that Sun himself before long came to term "the Constitutional Struggle." Li, Liang and their core coterie did not realize it yet, but the hourglass had been turned on the Second Republic..."

- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924

[1] No idea how this works in practice, but it was a thing during China's brief 1910s experiment with democracy.
[2] When writing about 1910s China on May 4th, I couldn't not, lol

 

[KingSweden24]

"...nobody had suspected a war loomed on the horizon when 1918 dawned; but just twelve months later, it seemed that something was in the air, and it was entirely unclear what exactly was going to provide a diplomatic off-ramp to avoid a war.

The last time Europe had seemed poised on the brink of open war to the point that mobilization plans were being dusted off was not the series of crises over Monaco or Serbia in the early 1910s [1] but rather instead that of Siam in 1892; the Bangkok Crisis, or Gunboat Crisis in German historiography, had nearly brought France, Germany and maybe even Britain into a shooting war over Siamese independence and its position in their respective Oriental empires. That near-miss, which had invited newspaper headlines that declared WAR IN SIGHT, had been followed by nearly three decades of general peace. Napoleon IV and his German counterpart Heinrich I had, albeit unofficially, committed themselves to an off-and-on deepening of economic and political bonds known as the Great Detente which while having largely died as a concrete program with the French Emperor had nonetheless built a culture of trust between Paris and Berlin in the decade 1895-1905. The collapse of Spanish authority in the Philippines and their subsequent annihilation at sea by the Japanese had triggered not another war crisis but a Triple Intervention which had given Germany control of the eastern two-thirds of Mindanao as a colony and an Anglo-French economic vassalage over the remaining Philippines, a set of circumstances hashed out over Spanish and Japanese heads that forgave any lingering bad blood over Germany's early exit from the Boxer War with a permanent cession of Amoy and economic control deep into its hinterland.

The spirit of Amsterdam was entirely gone by 1919, and not just due to escalating Franco-German enmity. The Philippine Revolution had terrified European powers, but the Ghadar Mutiny in India in February of 1915, which had concluded in a two-year civil war in Punjab and considerable concerns in London over the stability of India, had been a near-apocalypse for European influence in the East. That the Mutiny had been followed by the so-called May Revolution in French Indochina, in which tens of thousands of Vietnamese had revolted under the banner of the boy-emperor Duy Tan, had created even more of a siege mentality in colonial capitals such as Delhi, Hanoi, or Batavia. Flowing outwards from Canton, Shanghai and to a lesser extent Hongkong was a revolutionary anti-imperialist and rejectionist ideology of "Pan-Asianism," inspired by the increasingly powerful Guomindang (Nationalist Party) of China which in February 1919 won effective control of both houses of the Republic of China's legislature. At the other end of the spectrum sat Japan, which while skeptical of the republicanism and revolutionary leftism inherent in the thinking that the Guomindang and Philippine Katipunan parties were inspiring across Asia nonetheless supported a line of "Asia for the Asians" and increasingly viewed Europe's presence in Asia as an affront, taking the stance that Japan was the rightful north star of the Orient and that Europe was trespassing in her backyard. The Orient was thus a tinderbox waiting to erupt, but also very much a secondary theater to the tensions that were about to envelop Europe. Nonetheless, the nuances of the rivalries in place there are important to understand in the context of the opportunistic war that was to come.

Much of the conflict that would envelop East Asia at the turn of the 1920s stemmed from France's longstanding position as the pole power of the Orient and the gradual, decades-long erosion of that power. [2] France had participated in the Second Opium War alongside Britain but come away with only a financial compensation after four years of intervention, unlike the British who had earned themselves Kowloon. The French, buffeted by their victory in Mexico and needing a nationalist jolt after their loss to Germany in the Third Unification War, was able to quickly prosecute a war against Korea in 1870 that earned them a protectorate over the peninsula and a treaty port in Busan, a series of events which quickly brought them into conflict with China and Japan, neither of which was particularly interested in seeing Korea in French hands; a series of proxy skirmishes and attempted putsches in Korea saw Japan's influence temporarily wane, but France would fight the Sino-French War in 1884-85 to fully remove Chinese influence from both Korea and Tonkin and earning them land cessions of Formosa and Hainan, a series of events that left France as the hegemon of East Asia, for a time.

This position in Asia meant that there needed to be a full naval presence there, and France was happy to oblige. It enjoyed the second largest navy in the world, still narrowly ahead of the United States with the conclusion of the Great American War, and unlike Germany thus possessed the ability to deploy dreadnoughts at Cam Ranh, the sheltered bay northeast of Saigon that served as France's answer to Hongkong or Singapore. It also proved a perfect central location from which to threaten the sea lanes between Canton and Hongkong towards Singapore and the Straits of Molucca, and when taken in tandem with their destroyer base at Takow on Formosa and the submarine and cruiser base in the Pescadores, the French controlled both entrances to the South China sea and could, theoretically, close the Formosa Strait at their leisure. It was this set of circumstances that, as France embarked on a massive naval rearmament program with the advent of the Boxer War, had led to major British investments at Singapore and also a sense in Germany that they needed a more constructive program in the Orient.

This was not always easy to manage in Berlin. While German newspapers often complained about the Reich's lack of colonial prestige, Germany had, through careful maneuvering, assembled quite the overseas empire by the end of the 1910s, managing to leverage good but non-allied relations with Britain into a massive windfall in southwest-central Africa in 1916. This had, ironically, led in part to a decline in German interest in Asia; with its vast new African territories that included the mineral-rich Katanga Plateau, German fast cruisers, the backbone of their fleet, were now more valuable deployed to defend their massive holdings on the Atlantic, rather than worry as much about scattered islands in the Carolines, the Bismarck Archipelago, ungovernable Mindanao, or their protectorate over Cambodia. The same fear of German expansionism in Africa - exacerbated by the Congo Crises of 1918 - in Paris was counterbalanced by an increasing sense in the halls of the Governor-General in Hanoi that German interest in the Orient was waning, and that there was little the German Ostasienflotte, comprising of little more than a handful of cruisers spread between its small naval bases at Amoy, Kampong Som in Cambodia and Davau in the East Indies, could do to resist in the event of war. France was worried about Germany in Europe, but in the Orient, a clique of particularly aggressive colonial officers who had spent their entire careers - in some cases entire lives - in Hanoi, Saigon and Taipeh saw an opportunity to dramatically redraw the borders of the French Orient and undo the embarrassment of 1892 at last.

This was the crux of the issue - the rivalry between Germany and France in Africa, Europe, even the Americas was playing out differently in East Asia, a territory where France wholly had the upper hand if it was seen as a binary matter but where there were also a number of other players involved who were total wildcards. The most obvious was Japan, which coveted a stronger position in the Philippines as well as the island of Formosa and the final removal of French influence from Korea, but also China and the Netherlands. China was for understandable reasons fairly agnostic about European squabbles but highly opportunistic, and thanks to geography and recent history was more naturally inclined to sympathize with Germany. It was France who after all had humiliated China thirty years earlier and stripped them of Formosa, Hainan and Kwangchow Wan, and then seized Chefou in 1901 for good measure at the conclusion of the Boxer Wars. Germany was an imperialist power, yes, but her most prestigious colony did not lie on China's borders, nor did it exercise the type of undo influence internally in China as France did over the provinces of Yunnan and Kwangshi.

The Netherlands, for its part, had a different set of incentives. It was generally Germanophilic in European affairs and took pride in its neutrality, but in the matters of the Orient, it was vehemently Francophile. The Koninklijke Marine existed almost exclusively to defend the Dutch East Indies (DEI), and the emergence of two resistance movements - one republican and inspired by the Katipunan and Guomindang, the other politically Islamic, both revolutionary and anti-imperialist - in their crown jewel colony terrified not just the professional and capable administrators in Batavia but the conservative governments in the Binnenhof, the Dutch Parliament. As such, the Dutch quickly came to view France's position in the Orient as the most resistant to "revolutionary pan-Asianism" that was thought to be inspired ideologically by Cantonese intellectuals and financed in an ambitious Japan, a Japan which the Dutch suspected planned to eventually seize Formosa by force, vassalize the Philippines, and then move on the East Indies as a resource colony. The French thus had an important and powerful friend in the neighborhood, and while there was no formal alignment - again, the Dutch valued neutrality in Europe as a matter of longstanding policy - Paris was highly aware that they enjoyed tacit Dutch support in the Orient and planned accordingly, both in political maneuvers and in how they structured their colonial defenses..."

- A Storm in the Orient

[1] A wholly bizarre but very Cinco de Mayo sentence
[2] Some of this is a refresher from stuff forty years ago in the TL, and also an effort to contextualize it all in one place.

 

[KingSweden24]

(Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone! To celebrate, I give you an update set in Mexico.)
--
"...as many as four million people may have been in Mexico City that day for the funeral in the Cathedral of Mexico City after six days lying in state, following by its the funeral train to the Mayan-inspired mausoleum just southwest of the Chapultepec. [1] The funeral of Maximilian I of Mexico became an event that soon was as much legend as historical event in the Mexican collective memory; there was a popular story that so many flowers and vigil candles were left at the crypt that it nearly burned several times, and that a hundred thousand rosaries and crosses were collected from its steps.

The funeral on January 28, 1919 was one of those days that an entire generation of Mexicans could thus remember, even if they had not attended it themselves. The cultural shock of the passing of the Padre de Patria in the wake of the upheavals of the Maderato and then the war years left the country reeling and uncertain, looking back at an extremely uncomfortable decade that had dramatically reshaped the reality they understood and looking ahead to 1920 and beyond with trepidation. It was the exact fertile ground that a strongman like Reyes needed to continue to deepen his control over Mexican institutions, and the uncertainty many had about the ability of Louis Maximilian to serve as Emperor, despite his cautious and capable nature, certainly did not help.

The funeral of Maximilian also marked, ironically, an important sidebar in the dramatic leadup to the Central European War; delegations from all the major European powers were present to honor a long-lived Habsburg on the other side of the world, and the Spanish Infante Francisco Jose, the younger of King Carlos Jose's twin sons, made a game effort to try to cobble together in Mexico City's parlors and salons some kind of last-ditch effort to establish backchannels between French, German and Belgian attendees (Belgium honored the Empress Carlota, the aunt of their King Leopold III, by sending his eldest son and heir Prince Leopold, the most senior prince of any European power to appear), but it was for naught. The Germans maintained their view that France and Belgium was intentionally goading Austria into acquitting Prince Stephane Clement of the murder of the Bavarian Prince Franz, and that only turning over Stephane Clement to be imprisoned in Germany for the affront would be a sufficient result.

As such, this effort to find some solution, some way out of the crisis, failed rather miserably, and Maximilian's funeral indeed proved to get lost in the chaos that was to follow over the next several months..."

- El Jefe de Jefes: Luis Napoleon Morones' Mexico

[1] Say, where Los Pinos stands today...