The Sodalite Revolt of 1830

France managed to ride out the Burning Thirties more or less unscathed. They had better things to do, like catching their breath. The House of Burgundy just finished toppling the House of Guise, driven Spain out of the Côte d'Or (with a bit of help), and hounded the Most Christian King [who?] into Roman exile. There was work to do: standardizing measures, rebuilding polders, renegotiating treaties, restoring normalcy in France.

In 1830, it had a chance to come undone - and didn't.

The I.C.&Cie. Modeste AR

The world's most famous tierseur is also its least respected. In the market ecology of tierseurs, the Modeste's niche is to be the pariah, the untouchable, the one that all other customers sniff their noses at. The Modeste exists as a designated inferior for all others in the industry to be better than in every way. It also exists because a valid market niche exists for such a device.

Before 1895, the tierseureries coexisted in peace. Oh, there was drama between the tierseureurs - what artistic medium isn't without its petty feuds and legendary rivalries? - but the industry, such as it was, was governed by a rigid unspoken code of honor. Each tierseurerie was distinct, and they made a point of not stepping on each other's toes.

In 1895, Innocent Cauvigne et Cie. introduced their own interpretation of the tierseur. No sooner had the first order been shipped than the Calais firm was buried under a dozen lawsuits from outraged tierseureries, each and all striving to destroy the upstart.

The Shimoga man-eaters

The events described in this post are nothing historical. No lines on maps were redrawn because of it, no wars fought, no great men created and only a few notable ones [who?] destroyed. If I had never thought of it, if it had never been written, Andalusada would look no different. In no way does this significantly change the overall flow of history.

This post is parerga. And yet it is legendary parerga. This post is a symptom of imperial France in its decline, a post of a story that's become etched in the French consciousness as surely as Jaws is in ours.

Background to the Shimoga man-eaters

Since it hasn't been mentioned in awhile, southern India is a French colony. L'affaire de Chimogue was entirely a colonial affair, taking place in French Malenadu - specifically in the vicinity of Shimoga, home to a fairly large and young coffee latifonde.

• The War of the French Succession left the Empire perilously close to fiscal collapse; the next generation had been spent trying to rebuild it. Fortunately for them, the Iberian coffee monopoly had cracked with the collapse of Umayyad Seville thirty years earlier; since the price of New World coffee stayed high (between limited Mexican production and Cabralia's war-shaken economy), the French colonies were able to make it a lucrative cash crop, leading to the Oriental Company's latifundism.
• From the 1880s, the spread of coffee rust blight from Africa started seriously impacting the global coffee market. French India, which had thus far managed to avoid the coffee blight, was thus even more profitable than it had ever been before.
• About a generation later [when?], tiger-hunting become the sport of choice for a certain type of cosmopolitan noble twit. Guns in hand (many totally inadequate for the task; many Frenchmen gave their lives before the black-powder cat-gun was sorted out), they managed to devastate the Malabar tiger population, which led to some interesting side effects, such as...
• ...the collapse of tiger-hunting, and with it preparation for dealing with tigers.
• ...the collapse of a lot of former tiger habitats, as growing populations along the Malabar Coast began expanding outward, pushing back the tree coverage that the tigers needed to move and progressively driving them north.
• ...a period of about a decade in which so few tiger hunts were successful that the tables began to turn: every year during this period [when?], Malabar tigers killed more humans than humans could find tigers to kill. (This was chalked up to the tigers being more aggressive rather than any environmental changes.)

French colonial policy had thoughtlessly prepared a perfect storm. Early in the 20th century [when?], that storm hit.

Tierseur

Tierseur, n. French. A third-bore rifle, esp. used for the hunting of dangerous game.

In the French Empire, no hunt is more revered or mythologized than the tiger hunt. And just as no iconic Great White Hunter IRL is complete without a big-bore double rifle, no great French hunter is great without his weapon of choice: a tierseur.

Introducing St. Matilda

Saint Matilda exists because Saint Dominic doesn't. Per Rule of Canny, Andalusada needs someone to fill his shoes, an that someone is Saint Gonzalo of Lerida - but he's an original character, which means that I have both free room and a lot of details to fill in. And back before his page took on its current form, one of my earliest notes about Gonzalo was something I wanted in his story: "a Gonzalan St. Clare."

For the longest time, this has sat unattended, because the only reason I introduced Gonzalo was because John George wasn't an Augustinian, and I honestly hadn't had any interesting thoughts about it. Last night, though, while trying to rename Catholic orders to fit into my arbitrary naming conventions, I discovered some really cool things, which brought this back to mind - and I'm gonna make the most of it.

Dystopian Catholic France

Andalusada's France has had a different sets of ups and downs. It missed out on the revolutions, for one thing; as of the present day, under the House of Burgundy, it's a semi-constitutional monarchy struggling to recover from the Great War. The Hundred Years' War is called something different, and I know that it played out differently because I have some ideas for how the Black Death affects the British Isles. But you wouldn't know about that, because I haven't written about that stuff at all.

I write what I know, and at the moment this is primarily the early modern era. And since I like pithy names (mind you Hispano-Baltic Texas), and try to write about Andalusada the same way I talk about it, I'm gonna introduce early modern France by its working name. In French historiography, everything related to the period is tagged with the adjective très-chrétien; in the rest of Andalusada, early modern France is "the Most Christian Kingdom." But within this blog, it's what I've called it for at least a year: Dystopian Catholic France.

Messieurs, mesdames, it's time to stare into the abyss. Don't let it stare back into you.

Dystopian Catholic France 101

Alt-history writers have a bad rap for making history more awful. At its most ambitious we have Bruce Sterling's Draka series, and Harry Turtledove's TL-191 involving a surviving CSA, and any number of Nazi-victory timelines. One of my goals with Andalusada was to, as a general rule, make the world less awful - it's why the first thing I wrote about Great Russia's economy was two words long: "Not Stalinism."

Dystopian Catholic France makes the first question of the national 101 take on a new meaning: why? Why did I give one of the world powers over to a family that rips people's tongues out of their heads?

• Who? The House of Guise.
• What? IRL French royal absolutism, coupled with a Catholic hierarchy as independent as powerful as IRL Spain's. Coupled with a devoutly Catholic royal family that fears and hates the Farrellites for the harm they caused.
• Where? Most of what we'd call "France," but with some exceptions. Dystopian Catholic France, much like its successor, controls at the very least most of what we'd consider Belgium; the French empire-building that took place during the Hanseatic Wars lasted pretty well until the succession collapsed, so at various points it's controlled smatterings of the moribund Holy Roman Empire and enough coastline to threaten Denmark-Sweden.
• When? France makes the turn toward dystopia while the Wars of Religion are underway. It mellows out a bit, but never backs away from the institutional dystopianism until after the House of Guise is well and thoroughly displaced. So maybe ~1625 to ~1825, give or take a few years either way.

I didn't answer why? at the top, because it would've taken too long. And the truth is: I still don't have a satisfying explanation. All I have is a true one.

The French Wars of Religion

Timeframe: Early 1600s [when?]
Belligerents: Three major factions: the Guisards, the "Legitimists," and the Unitas Fidelium.
Outcome: The passage of the French throne to the Guisard faction.

THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION

It is a dark time for the Kingdom of France. The throne in Paris sits empty, as the armies of three pretenders endlessly battle against each other for the destiny of France. The winner of this struggle will choose the fate of France. Will that fate be Catholic, Farrellite, or Iberian?

Well, I've talked about this before. I've written about it, before (and since.) It occurs to me (after this newest edit, to get rid of the Star Wars joke) that I should probably write about it. And with that said, here's the writing.

The Nestorian Epistles

There are many things that bother me in alternate histories. Three of them come to mind right off the bat, like so:

• The humanities tend to be plot-significant-only. Presumably there's an enormous amount of art and writing and architecture that's going on in any timeline, but nobody ever takes a break to discuss what the hell it is unless it's directly related to the overarching story.
• Directly related to the above, the mental landscape of the world is assumed to never significantly deviate from the IRL norm unless it's plot-significant. (Even then, there's relatively little exploration of how it deviates, or the consequences of doing so.)
• Eurocentrism.

So, for variety, today I'm gonna blog about a fictional work of writing, loosely inspired by the Persian Letters of our world.

International perceptions of India

IRL, our perception of "India" is actually of north India. India is Aryan; "Indian" restaurants (at least in America; not sure how it works in the UK) are much closer to Punjabi than, say, Gujarati cuisine. This isn't "natural"; it evolved this way for historical reasons.

After a thousand years of divergence, Andalusada's Indian subcontinent has diverged in two ways, hinted at before but spelled out explicitly here:

• The colonial hegemon is French. England, Scotland, Portugal and a few other players all have their own presence on the subcontinent, but most of that looks disproportionately large on maps because otherwise it wouldn't be visible at all.
• Colonialism has been much less successful. Because of various trends that are still too far in the future for me to explain yet, the French Empire has not been able to build a united French Raj. While Paris controls much more of India than you might expect (especially given that unlike the United Kingdom IRL they have not had a solid century of domestic tranquility), Gujarat and points north have repeatedly fought the Firangis to a standstill, and Bengal has successfully played its French and Scottish (later Anglo-Scottish) neighbors off each other so long and so well that it's become an established buffer state.

So what are the consequences of this?

The Great Powers, ca. 1930

Andalusada's arbitrarily defined present day, as set down by GURPS canon, is 1930. This is what the world looks like then.

France 

For most of the early modern era, France was a Catholic dystopia, using the power of the Sodality and the weakness of its neighbors to horrifying effect. In the aftermath of the War of the French Succession, it's become significantly less dystopian (and slightly less Catholic), but as of the present day it's a large, powerful unitary state in a world that's convinced they aren't going to last.

• Has a slightly different core territory (missing some of the east and southeast, but including more in the north, including Alsace, Lorraine, and a fair chunk of the Low Countries.)
• Imperial holdings: India. All of Dravidian India is basically under French control; so is most of its coastline, stalled firmly by little Bengal (and its international allies.)

 England-Scotland

 England and Scotland are sort of two separate countries. During the

• Imperial holdings: Almost all of North America between them (most notably New Ireland), "Guinea" (a lot of sub-Saharan West Africa), and some chunks of southeast Asia.
• Alliances: A close alliance with Bengal, to act as a check on French expansion out of India. Historically, Japan's been a close ally of England-Scotland, but since the breakdown of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance a decade ago it's nothing quite as secure.

"Great Russia"

A *Narodnik republic with a needlessly wordy name (the Autocephalous Revolutionary National Sobor of All the Russias, or something like that. It changes every few years.)

• Capital: Tver, because it's never Tver.
• Core territories: Russia and Siberia.
• Imperial holdings: A loudly complaining *Alaska, most notably.
• Alliances: Propping up proxy states in Karelia, Anatolia, and some parts of Central Asia. Great Russia has a nonaggression pact with Japan that's older than Great Russia itself; it used to have close ties to Korea, but those have waned since what happened to Evgeny the Old.

Saxony

• Along with the Kingdom of Bavaria, one of the two vicars of the Holy Roman Empire (which is defunct but hasn't been abolished.)
• The smallest of the Great Powers; not so much a power on its own, but the keystone of the alliance that tips the balance in almost every European land war.
• Core territories: Electoral Saxony, along with most of what we'd call the Duchy of Saxony, the better part of Thuringia, and some scattered others.
• Imperial holdings: The Suez* Canal. After some rearrangements, Saxony wound up with almost controlling ownership of it, and has made itself a bit of a broker. Quixotically, they've also colonized Port Sudan, which they're trying to build into a respectable international harbor.
• Alliances: At the moment, Poland-Ruthenia and the Baltic states in the east, which it's trying to cement into a central European military bloc against Russian expansionism. Egypt and Abyssinia have some relatively equal treaties too, as a check against Anglo-French adventurism.