Always thought it was kind of dumb the converter still has you go for those lands if you want to form Germany even if the Ostsiedlung never happened in your timeline. Like the Polabians are still living in the Northeast, there are no Berliners.
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That's not the case here, actually! I can't recall if the converter dropped the north-eastern lands automatically, since they're no longer cores for GER, or if I manually edited the decision way back when. The Sorbian-owned lands in question are actually some ethnic German provinces (and so GER cores) in Saxony, IIRC. No need to drive all the way to Prussia to check the requirements this time. I can post a culture map of the area later today.
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tbh it could also just be that I've been using the converters for a very long time and am remembering an older version. I remember at one point getting Germany in EU4->Vic2 was annoying because you needed to get Riga for instance.
The Kingdom of Italy, 1900-1904: The War Land
Excerpt from 'The Great War: a History', written by Bettino Rattazi (Napoli: 1983)
The end of the War did not end hostilities. New borders had been laid down, but not all those living within them agreed with the vision of the victorious Powers. The region of Elsass-Lothringen had been left with France after a September 1898 plebiscite showed overwhelming pro-French sentiment. This plebiscite was not accepted by Bavaria, which marched its forces across the border shortly afterwards and demanded the territory's annexation into Bavaria as a 'historically German region', a claim of dubious veracity at best. (...) France, crippled and disarmed, received no sympathy from the Central Powers; the government was bound to agree, and Elsass-Lothringen was ceded to the Bavarian invaders. (...)
The German Question was cause of other conflicts as well. The new Rhenish Confederation had not received the claimed Gelrean enclave of the Saarland when it had come into being in the Warsaw Conference. In August 1899, adventurous 'Freikorps' made up of demobilized veterans and volunteers eager to have a taste of the wartime 'glory' attacked Gelrean forces in the region, but were beaten back and eventually withdrawn by the Confederation government, which was not prepared for full-scale war. (...)
In the North, the island of Saaremaa off the Estonian coast sparked fighting in September. The Warsaw Treaty had mandated a popular plebiscite in 1900 to determine whether the island would remain part of Sweden or join Estonia. The Estonian government claimed that the Swedes planned to interfere with the vote in October 1899. The nation craved an easy victory to quiet domestic unrest, and Saaremaa looked like a likely candidate. In September 1899, Estonian forces occupied the island, and the Central Powers granted their tacit blessing by canceling the plebiscite as unnecessary. Sweden could only comply. (...)
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) The Serbian royal regime fell in January 1900. (...) The situation in Serbia was chaotic from the beginning. The new Communist government was never able to fully extend their authority over the countryside. The revolution appeared to offer little for the peasantry; they had suffered under Wallachian rule for decades and had little desire to now toil for what appeared the old iron fist, only this time painted red. The Communist power base was in the cities and in the rank and file of the military. For the party theorists, the rural peasant was something suspect and alien - superstitious, reactionary and ungrateful. He would have to be beaten into line. The forced collectivization programmes proclaimed from the cities met with waves of resistance.
(...) Regardless, revolution was in the air all over the Balkans. The collapse of Wallachian power and the carving out of new nations from its borderlands had left the region alive with dreamers and adventurers of all stripes. The revolutionary cause had only been emboldened by the wretchedness of the Great War, which made plain the unmasked horror of the imperialist world order. (...)
Socialist revolution appeared to offer a pathway to national independence for many stateless peoples worldwide. (...) Berber nationalism at the turn of the century was increasingly intertwined with left-wing ideology. Failed uprisings and campaigns had turned the peoples of the Maghreb away from the promises of liberals and reformers. Only complete systemic change could provide autonomy and independence for the oppressed. Similar developments could be seen in Italian sub-Saharan Africa and in the Italian Indies. (...) Some of these activists should be classified more as fellow travelers or opportunists than true believers, of course. The socialist cause merely offered them the international support and funding they required to further their own nationalist aims. (...)
The situation remained precarious. In Buenos Aires, the authoritarian Communists had provoked border hostilities with the neighboring nation of Argentina. In August 1901, Argentina's liberal-democratic regime announced that it would no longer 'allow the insidious Red Scourge to grow unchecked' and mobilized for a full-scale invasion of its old rival. (...) Buenos Aires defeat was swift and humiliating. To avoid a total collapse of their own power, the Communist government pleaded with Argentina for peace. (...) The price would be the loss of central Buenos Aires and the partition of the nation into geographically isolated halves. (...)
September 1901 provided the spark for the powderkeg of Java. Pramudya Soerjo, a Javan poet and union leader, was attacked and beaten by enforcers of the Italian administration for his vocal criticism of Italian business interests on the islands. Erroneous news of Soerjo's death soon circulated in Serang to the outrage of local workers and intellectuals. Tens of thousands flooded the streets in protest and besieged administrative offices in the city centre. After local gendarmes attempted to disperse the crowds with gunfire, enraged workers rushed the shooters and lynched them on the spot. Violence broke out across the city and quickly spread into the countryside. (...) Ironically, these developments caught the leaders of the Javanese revolutionary movement unawares. The revolutionary parties now hurried to climb astride the wave of History before it passed them by, flashing the signal for long-awaited Liberation with red lanterns over the city's rooftops. (...) By the week's end, all of western Java was rising up in revolt.
(...) The response in Firenze was one of despair. Reports had just been received by the government which suggested that any attempt to deploy elements of the Army to the Indies would likely spark mass mutinies among the war-weary troops. An alarming percentage of Italian soldiers were estimated to be 'socialists or socialist-leaning'; the last thing that should be done was to give them an excuse to show their colors to a frighteningly restless home front. (...) As a result, the following year would see the Italian colonial government essentially cede almost all of Java to the rebels. Only the ominous presence of the Italian Far East Fleet on the shores of Java kept the insurgents from storming the last bastions of Italian rule. Revolutionary sympathies had not yet reached Italian sailors to any great degree, but that would change. (...)
With the rule of King and Capital falling everywhere, or so it appeared, fears of revolution did not seem unfounded. The French Communists began their uprising in November. Council republics were declared in communes across northern France, but the wartorn nation proved resistant to the charms of the Left. The reduced French Imperial Army was still capable of defending the capital and winning any pitched battles the revolutionaries were driven to. In the end, the uprising faded into a persistent campaign of guerilla warfare and civil disobedience centered mostly in the urbanized north. (...) They would soon be followed by 'Jacobin' revolutionaries seeking to create a liberal-democratic republic, as well as reactionary nationalists and separatist fighters, but for now the French state still held the reins of power. (...) France was headed for its darkest hour. (...)
Excerpts from 'The War Land: Europe in the Aftermath of the Great War', written by Lars Emil Nilsen (Kobenhavn: 1990)
(...) The constitutional crisis would likely have been settled peacefully in any other time. The post-war madness was strong in Denmark as well, however. On December 19, the King entered the Christiansborg Palace to address the parliament. Infamously, the left of the Folketing immediately began jeering and cursing at their monarch. The King's speech began half an hour late and did not proceed far before renewed shouting drowned it out. The convened representatives of the left then began chanting 'Give Up the Crown' until the defeated King was escorted out of the Palace. (...) In the morning, the government ordered royal forces out onto the streets of Copenhagen and decreed the arrest of key opposition politicians for lèse-majesté. (...)
The King and his ministers had miscalculated. Massive demonstrations gripped the city and resisted attempts by the police and military to restore order. (...) On the 22nd, the order was given to use lethal force to disperse the rioters outside the Royal Palace. For a chilling moment, the future of the nation hung in balance. Then soldiers all across the lines began throwing down their weapons and walking into the crowd. The royal gambit had failed. The common servicemen of the military were defecting to the 'enemy'. (...) Military elements loyal to the opposition arrested the royal government in the evening of the 23rd. The King, preparing for Christmas festivities, was escorted out of the Palace in a state of shock and confusion and taken into custody. (...) On Christmas Eve, 1901, the new government addressed the riotous crowds from the balcony of the Palace to proclaim the abolition of the monarchy and the foundation of the Republic of Denmark. (...)
Excerpts from the memoirs of Nandana Manola, the 'Red Marshal of Ceylon', written in 1930; describing experiences in the Ceylonese Revolution
(...) Those years were a waking dream, a constant state of delirium. The government had ceased to govern. I had resigned my commission and retired to the family home. Even in the country new ideas and new slogans rang out from every mouth, most of them anarchist, socialist, or a little bit of both. (...) We'd assumed that the peripheries of the nation were happy pieces in the great machinery of state, but these hungry and chaotic years shattered that foolish illusion. The moment our Chinese conquerors departed, the Bengal erupted in flames. The Bengali people had enough of Ceylonese rule; they fought now for nothing less than full independence. In January 1902, that's exactly what they claimed. That grand dream collapsed soon into rule by tyrants and old world backwardsness, but then the cause was just. (...)
I was back in the Party by March. In the quiet life, I'd foolishly assumed that all the talk of impending Revolution was just that - brave words and little else. I would soon discover that actions were not long behind for my comrades. Indeed, while I'd labored in irresponsible isolation, millions of my countrymen had already taken up arms for the cause. The Revolution had indeed already begun. (...)
If you had told me five years earlier that an army of hundreds of thousands would rise up on the side of the workers and triumph against royal forces, I would have called you mad - and likely reported you to the political police. Fortunately, I was no longer that spineless lackey of Crown and Church. The most rewarding time of my life began then. I was doing what I did best - the ugly business of warfare - but I did it at last for a cause I could truly believe in. Our Liberation was at hand. (...) We swept government forces before us like a tsunami. Thousands defected rather than fight us at every turn. We seemed to advance as if weightless, lifted up by the sheer joy and pride we felt in what we were accomplishing. (...)
Victory gets you noticed. I was made Colonel in April, Lieutenant-General by July. I suddenly found out that I had a great deal of voice when it came to local Party business and made a foolish speech about the dangers of giving too much weight to the opinions of military personnel in matters of Revolution. Strangely enough, that stunt was the exact thing that ended up catapulting me to the attention of the Three Heroes and the Party leadership. (...) In August, we dug out the King from his hole and finally got to put him on trial. I won't waste words on that sordid business. Needless to say, the crimes were many, and they made even hardened military men sick to hear them. The lot of the royals faced a firing squad by the end of the week. The same day, we declared the Kingdom abolished, and the Union of Indian Socialist Republics as its sole and legitimate successor. (...) Every day, the world seemed to be spinning faster. I was realizing that's just how I liked it. (...)
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) The reins were slipping from Italy's grasp. In July 1902, the Chinese Empire flagrantly violated the terms of its containment by annexing Mughal Qinghai, a region it had annexed in the later stages of the Great War. Rather than stand up for its ally in Central Asia, Firenze failed to even condemn the aggressive act. Mughalistan would not acknowledge the loss of Qinghai until 1950. (...) Only four years after instituting the most ambitious geopolitical web of power the world had ever seen, Italy was spiraling towards isolationism as problems at home threatened to overwhelm the resources of the government. The economy was continuing its downwards crash, the government's heavy-handed recovery measures proving utterly ineffective against the shock of demobilization and wind-down from wartime production. (...)
In public, of course, government showed no signs of panic. Calm assurances filled every state paper. The unrest would fade away and the economy would stabilize. The people only needed to be patient. (...) Indeed, some measure of normalcy did return by 1902. The subsidization of Italian industries and businesses kept hopelessly unprofitable companies upright and millions employed, even as government profits trickled away to nothing. (...) The colonial empire came to the rescue of the metropole for once - at least for a brief time. Exotic imports and natural resource extraction in the colonies stimulated the Italian economy and resulted in a growth period at the beginning of the century.
Soon use was found for the surplus factories and shipyards of the War as well. Though the Italian Navy had dominated the seas throughout the Great War, it had made itself obsolete as well with a wide variety of advances in shipmaking, naval armaments and doctrinal refinements. As a result, the government began in 1902 construction of hundreds of new warships, chief among them heavyweight cruisers and battleships that alone accounted for tens of thousands of new jobs. (...)
1903 also saw an agreement of military alliance with the Republic of Canada in North America. This alliance was born out of a desire to expand Italian influence into the Americas as well. (...) Canada proved a difficult partner from the start. The ultranationalist Restauration Nationale party had ambitions of its own, and Italy's promises of assistance were taken at face value. (...) In August 1903, Canada declared war on the small republic of Columbia in the Pacific Northwest, publicly calling upon Italy for support. While this was of little consequence to Italy - the war against the poverty-ridden republic needed no outside assistance - but it revealed a troubling tendency in the Canadians to go off wildly on their own without consulting the Italian government. (...) A nationalist fervor and desire to redress the balance of power in North America had gripped Canada as well. Millions of young men demanded a chance to prove their mettle in battle as the millions of Europe and Asia had in the Great War. (...)
Such fervor can blind even men at the highest levels of government to what is possible and wise. On October 1903, the Republic of Canada made the stunning demand to the American ambassador that all Canadian territories were to be at once returned to the Republic, or else the Republic would consider the two nations to be in a state of war. This would have meant ceding all states that had once been part of French Canada; an outrageous demand, though one which suited the nationalistic fury raging across the globe and in the high halls of the Northern Republic. (...) Canada had modest armed forces, dwarfed even by just the US Northern Army. The Canadian government can only have expected for Italian forces to wage their war for them. The US refused and began to mobilize. Another public announcement was made by the Canadian government, this time claiming that Canada and its ally, the Kingdom of Italy, had declared war on the United States of America.
Firenze could only watch in horror. The Italian ambassador is said to have been reduced to tears when summoned by the US President in his attempts to absolve the Italian Crown of blame for the debacle. Frantic telegrams both to Canada and the US assured that Italy was not part of any war and indeed was a neutral party in any conflict on the continent. A public apology was made by the King himself. (...) Italy's humiliation before the eyes of the international community would go a long way in further weakening its hold on the 'Continental System'. Canada, for its part, fared very poorly in the 'War of Empty Promises', with peace made quickly after American forces crossed the border in November and a swift change of power to the Canadian opposition. (...)
For all its troubles, the period saw a considerable flourishing of culture. Both radical and traditional forms of Italian art and expression gained great attention across the globe. The famed tenor Enrico Caruso's performance at the Covent Garden in London is even thought to have directly resulted in a strengthening of Italo-British relations, with British King Harold III announcing (controversially at home) that the Italians were truly 'the most cultured people on God's green Earth'. The rise of jacobinism and socialism across Europe was bringing the two monarchies closer together, with the monarchs of both nations exchanging active correspondence on the means to deal with the situation. (...) In this atmosphere, Britain also supported Italy's bid for host of the Olympic Games in 1904 - though as the 'master of Europe', this was already perhaps to be expected. (...) For Italy, the 1904 Games were not only a chance to showcase the nation's glory and athletic prowess, but also a welcome distraction from the ravages of the War and from the ever-present unrest on the streets. (...)
Demobilization and disarmament did not prevent wars, though it left them mostly in the hands of local free corps and volunteer forces. The Svealand War of 1903-1904 between Denmark and Sweden was fought with makeshift armies which only incorporated small cores of regular troops. The international community looked to Italy, the new global enforcer, to end the fighting. The conflict was too distant to nudge the government into action, however, especially as both Denmark and Sweden were merely defeated enemies and could be allowed to 'whack each other senseless' if that was what they wished. (...) The Swedish victory finally allowed relations to stabilize in Scandinavia. (...) But a crisis was coming where Italy could not simply sit and watch. (...)
The First Czechoslovak-Polish War had been fought in the final years of the Great War and ended swiftly by Italian intervention. In the years since, Czechoslovak revanchism and resentment had only grown. Though both nations remained Italian allies, Poland was by far the more valued partner in the 'Continental System'. (...) Italy's prolonged inaction emboldened the Czechoslovak military establishment. They proposed that with a 'lightning war', the matter of West Galicia could be resolved without Firenze having time to intervene. In January 1904, the government gave its blessing for the operation. Czechoslovak forces flooded over the border into West Galicia, where they met a prepared and vengeance-minded Polish defense.
This was not some overseas squabble or skirmish on the periphery. Italy's allies had began a full-scale war right across the border from Italian Austria. With Italian demands for an immediate ceasefire and negotiation falling on deaf ears, the government finally agreed to act. Czechoslovakia was the clear aggressor and had always been a troublesome friend. On January 10, 1904, Italy denounced the Czechoslovak invasion and began mobilizing forces for a 'peacekeeping operation' in Czechoslovakia. The surprised Czechoslovaks now faced a war on two fronts.
For many soldiers on both sides, it was a bitter day. Veterans who had fought side by side for years were thrown back into the grinder to murder old friends and comrades. For others, it was a chance for one last taste of glory, or for testing the new weapons from the final year of the War which had not seen true use in battle then. Even to most contemporary accounts, the War appeared a savage, senseless thing - the final proof of the death of the genteel old world, and the coming of a time of madness and death. (...)
The war effort was unsustainable for Czechoslovakia, despite its early successes against Polish forces in Galicia. (...) With the southern Czechoslovak front crumbling, Italian envoys shifted from asking for merely white peace to reparations and further demands. The chief Italian demand became the liberation of Pommerania, the small Czechoslovak satellite state on the Baltic coast - thus removing its last marginal access to the sea and suitably 'humbling' the upstart nation. (...) Instead, a pro-Italian party was to be put in power at court and a suitable Italian match found for the Duke of Pommerania. (...)
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) Argentina's anti-Communist crusade was now fully and decisively underway. The 1904 elections in Chile saw a popular front left-wing government thrust into power. Within two days, Argentine forces were marching over the border and began to drive the Chilean Army south. (...) The crushing Santiago Accords of 1904 saw the annexation of the vast majority of the Chilean Republic's territory. These 'wars for liberty' had coincidentally created the Greater Argentina which Argentine right-wing authors had advocated for decades. In the collapse of South American socialism, the age of Argentine Hegemony was being born. (...)
in Estonia, the Winter Campaign of 1903-1904 was beginning to show results. Royal forces had defeated most of the Estonian anarcho-communist forces by March, though it would take a good decade until the last bastions of these autonomists had been pulled up and returned to government control. The Russian provinces in particular were becoming increasingly hard to govern without resorting to constant excesses of brutal force. (...) The tide of Revolution had been halted in places, but it was far from over. Indeed, its greatest victory was still to come. (...)
The end of the War did not end hostilities. New borders had been laid down, but not all those living within them agreed with the vision of the victorious Powers. The region of Elsass-Lothringen had been left with France after a September 1898 plebiscite showed overwhelming pro-French sentiment. This plebiscite was not accepted by Bavaria, which marched its forces across the border shortly afterwards and demanded the territory's annexation into Bavaria as a 'historically German region', a claim of dubious veracity at best. (...) France, crippled and disarmed, received no sympathy from the Central Powers; the government was bound to agree, and Elsass-Lothringen was ceded to the Bavarian invaders. (...)
The German Question was cause of other conflicts as well. The new Rhenish Confederation had not received the claimed Gelrean enclave of the Saarland when it had come into being in the Warsaw Conference. In August 1899, adventurous 'Freikorps' made up of demobilized veterans and volunteers eager to have a taste of the wartime 'glory' attacked Gelrean forces in the region, but were beaten back and eventually withdrawn by the Confederation government, which was not prepared for full-scale war. (...)
In the North, the island of Saaremaa off the Estonian coast sparked fighting in September. The Warsaw Treaty had mandated a popular plebiscite in 1900 to determine whether the island would remain part of Sweden or join Estonia. The Estonian government claimed that the Swedes planned to interfere with the vote in October 1899. The nation craved an easy victory to quiet domestic unrest, and Saaremaa looked like a likely candidate. In September 1899, Estonian forces occupied the island, and the Central Powers granted their tacit blessing by canceling the plebiscite as unnecessary. Sweden could only comply. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) The Serbian royal regime fell in January 1900. (...) The situation in Serbia was chaotic from the beginning. The new Communist government was never able to fully extend their authority over the countryside. The revolution appeared to offer little for the peasantry; they had suffered under Wallachian rule for decades and had little desire to now toil for what appeared the old iron fist, only this time painted red. The Communist power base was in the cities and in the rank and file of the military. For the party theorists, the rural peasant was something suspect and alien - superstitious, reactionary and ungrateful. He would have to be beaten into line. The forced collectivization programmes proclaimed from the cities met with waves of resistance.
(...) Regardless, revolution was in the air all over the Balkans. The collapse of Wallachian power and the carving out of new nations from its borderlands had left the region alive with dreamers and adventurers of all stripes. The revolutionary cause had only been emboldened by the wretchedness of the Great War, which made plain the unmasked horror of the imperialist world order. (...)
Socialist revolution appeared to offer a pathway to national independence for many stateless peoples worldwide. (...) Berber nationalism at the turn of the century was increasingly intertwined with left-wing ideology. Failed uprisings and campaigns had turned the peoples of the Maghreb away from the promises of liberals and reformers. Only complete systemic change could provide autonomy and independence for the oppressed. Similar developments could be seen in Italian sub-Saharan Africa and in the Italian Indies. (...) Some of these activists should be classified more as fellow travelers or opportunists than true believers, of course. The socialist cause merely offered them the international support and funding they required to further their own nationalist aims. (...)
The situation remained precarious. In Buenos Aires, the authoritarian Communists had provoked border hostilities with the neighboring nation of Argentina. In August 1901, Argentina's liberal-democratic regime announced that it would no longer 'allow the insidious Red Scourge to grow unchecked' and mobilized for a full-scale invasion of its old rival. (...) Buenos Aires defeat was swift and humiliating. To avoid a total collapse of their own power, the Communist government pleaded with Argentina for peace. (...) The price would be the loss of central Buenos Aires and the partition of the nation into geographically isolated halves. (...)
September 1901 provided the spark for the powderkeg of Java. Pramudya Soerjo, a Javan poet and union leader, was attacked and beaten by enforcers of the Italian administration for his vocal criticism of Italian business interests on the islands. Erroneous news of Soerjo's death soon circulated in Serang to the outrage of local workers and intellectuals. Tens of thousands flooded the streets in protest and besieged administrative offices in the city centre. After local gendarmes attempted to disperse the crowds with gunfire, enraged workers rushed the shooters and lynched them on the spot. Violence broke out across the city and quickly spread into the countryside. (...) Ironically, these developments caught the leaders of the Javanese revolutionary movement unawares. The revolutionary parties now hurried to climb astride the wave of History before it passed them by, flashing the signal for long-awaited Liberation with red lanterns over the city's rooftops. (...) By the week's end, all of western Java was rising up in revolt.
(...) The response in Firenze was one of despair. Reports had just been received by the government which suggested that any attempt to deploy elements of the Army to the Indies would likely spark mass mutinies among the war-weary troops. An alarming percentage of Italian soldiers were estimated to be 'socialists or socialist-leaning'; the last thing that should be done was to give them an excuse to show their colors to a frighteningly restless home front. (...) As a result, the following year would see the Italian colonial government essentially cede almost all of Java to the rebels. Only the ominous presence of the Italian Far East Fleet on the shores of Java kept the insurgents from storming the last bastions of Italian rule. Revolutionary sympathies had not yet reached Italian sailors to any great degree, but that would change. (...)
With the rule of King and Capital falling everywhere, or so it appeared, fears of revolution did not seem unfounded. The French Communists began their uprising in November. Council republics were declared in communes across northern France, but the wartorn nation proved resistant to the charms of the Left. The reduced French Imperial Army was still capable of defending the capital and winning any pitched battles the revolutionaries were driven to. In the end, the uprising faded into a persistent campaign of guerilla warfare and civil disobedience centered mostly in the urbanized north. (...) They would soon be followed by 'Jacobin' revolutionaries seeking to create a liberal-democratic republic, as well as reactionary nationalists and separatist fighters, but for now the French state still held the reins of power. (...) France was headed for its darkest hour. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'The War Land: Europe in the Aftermath of the Great War', written by Lars Emil Nilsen (Kobenhavn: 1990)
(...) The constitutional crisis would likely have been settled peacefully in any other time. The post-war madness was strong in Denmark as well, however. On December 19, the King entered the Christiansborg Palace to address the parliament. Infamously, the left of the Folketing immediately began jeering and cursing at their monarch. The King's speech began half an hour late and did not proceed far before renewed shouting drowned it out. The convened representatives of the left then began chanting 'Give Up the Crown' until the defeated King was escorted out of the Palace. (...) In the morning, the government ordered royal forces out onto the streets of Copenhagen and decreed the arrest of key opposition politicians for lèse-majesté. (...)
The King and his ministers had miscalculated. Massive demonstrations gripped the city and resisted attempts by the police and military to restore order. (...) On the 22nd, the order was given to use lethal force to disperse the rioters outside the Royal Palace. For a chilling moment, the future of the nation hung in balance. Then soldiers all across the lines began throwing down their weapons and walking into the crowd. The royal gambit had failed. The common servicemen of the military were defecting to the 'enemy'. (...) Military elements loyal to the opposition arrested the royal government in the evening of the 23rd. The King, preparing for Christmas festivities, was escorted out of the Palace in a state of shock and confusion and taken into custody. (...) On Christmas Eve, 1901, the new government addressed the riotous crowds from the balcony of the Palace to proclaim the abolition of the monarchy and the foundation of the Republic of Denmark. (...)
***
Excerpts from the memoirs of Nandana Manola, the 'Red Marshal of Ceylon', written in 1930; describing experiences in the Ceylonese Revolution
(...) Those years were a waking dream, a constant state of delirium. The government had ceased to govern. I had resigned my commission and retired to the family home. Even in the country new ideas and new slogans rang out from every mouth, most of them anarchist, socialist, or a little bit of both. (...) We'd assumed that the peripheries of the nation were happy pieces in the great machinery of state, but these hungry and chaotic years shattered that foolish illusion. The moment our Chinese conquerors departed, the Bengal erupted in flames. The Bengali people had enough of Ceylonese rule; they fought now for nothing less than full independence. In January 1902, that's exactly what they claimed. That grand dream collapsed soon into rule by tyrants and old world backwardsness, but then the cause was just. (...)
I was back in the Party by March. In the quiet life, I'd foolishly assumed that all the talk of impending Revolution was just that - brave words and little else. I would soon discover that actions were not long behind for my comrades. Indeed, while I'd labored in irresponsible isolation, millions of my countrymen had already taken up arms for the cause. The Revolution had indeed already begun. (...)
If you had told me five years earlier that an army of hundreds of thousands would rise up on the side of the workers and triumph against royal forces, I would have called you mad - and likely reported you to the political police. Fortunately, I was no longer that spineless lackey of Crown and Church. The most rewarding time of my life began then. I was doing what I did best - the ugly business of warfare - but I did it at last for a cause I could truly believe in. Our Liberation was at hand. (...) We swept government forces before us like a tsunami. Thousands defected rather than fight us at every turn. We seemed to advance as if weightless, lifted up by the sheer joy and pride we felt in what we were accomplishing. (...)
Victory gets you noticed. I was made Colonel in April, Lieutenant-General by July. I suddenly found out that I had a great deal of voice when it came to local Party business and made a foolish speech about the dangers of giving too much weight to the opinions of military personnel in matters of Revolution. Strangely enough, that stunt was the exact thing that ended up catapulting me to the attention of the Three Heroes and the Party leadership. (...) In August, we dug out the King from his hole and finally got to put him on trial. I won't waste words on that sordid business. Needless to say, the crimes were many, and they made even hardened military men sick to hear them. The lot of the royals faced a firing squad by the end of the week. The same day, we declared the Kingdom abolished, and the Union of Indian Socialist Republics as its sole and legitimate successor. (...) Every day, the world seemed to be spinning faster. I was realizing that's just how I liked it. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) The reins were slipping from Italy's grasp. In July 1902, the Chinese Empire flagrantly violated the terms of its containment by annexing Mughal Qinghai, a region it had annexed in the later stages of the Great War. Rather than stand up for its ally in Central Asia, Firenze failed to even condemn the aggressive act. Mughalistan would not acknowledge the loss of Qinghai until 1950. (...) Only four years after instituting the most ambitious geopolitical web of power the world had ever seen, Italy was spiraling towards isolationism as problems at home threatened to overwhelm the resources of the government. The economy was continuing its downwards crash, the government's heavy-handed recovery measures proving utterly ineffective against the shock of demobilization and wind-down from wartime production. (...)
In public, of course, government showed no signs of panic. Calm assurances filled every state paper. The unrest would fade away and the economy would stabilize. The people only needed to be patient. (...) Indeed, some measure of normalcy did return by 1902. The subsidization of Italian industries and businesses kept hopelessly unprofitable companies upright and millions employed, even as government profits trickled away to nothing. (...) The colonial empire came to the rescue of the metropole for once - at least for a brief time. Exotic imports and natural resource extraction in the colonies stimulated the Italian economy and resulted in a growth period at the beginning of the century.
Soon use was found for the surplus factories and shipyards of the War as well. Though the Italian Navy had dominated the seas throughout the Great War, it had made itself obsolete as well with a wide variety of advances in shipmaking, naval armaments and doctrinal refinements. As a result, the government began in 1902 construction of hundreds of new warships, chief among them heavyweight cruisers and battleships that alone accounted for tens of thousands of new jobs. (...)
1903 also saw an agreement of military alliance with the Republic of Canada in North America. This alliance was born out of a desire to expand Italian influence into the Americas as well. (...) Canada proved a difficult partner from the start. The ultranationalist Restauration Nationale party had ambitions of its own, and Italy's promises of assistance were taken at face value. (...) In August 1903, Canada declared war on the small republic of Columbia in the Pacific Northwest, publicly calling upon Italy for support. While this was of little consequence to Italy - the war against the poverty-ridden republic needed no outside assistance - but it revealed a troubling tendency in the Canadians to go off wildly on their own without consulting the Italian government. (...) A nationalist fervor and desire to redress the balance of power in North America had gripped Canada as well. Millions of young men demanded a chance to prove their mettle in battle as the millions of Europe and Asia had in the Great War. (...)
Such fervor can blind even men at the highest levels of government to what is possible and wise. On October 1903, the Republic of Canada made the stunning demand to the American ambassador that all Canadian territories were to be at once returned to the Republic, or else the Republic would consider the two nations to be in a state of war. This would have meant ceding all states that had once been part of French Canada; an outrageous demand, though one which suited the nationalistic fury raging across the globe and in the high halls of the Northern Republic. (...) Canada had modest armed forces, dwarfed even by just the US Northern Army. The Canadian government can only have expected for Italian forces to wage their war for them. The US refused and began to mobilize. Another public announcement was made by the Canadian government, this time claiming that Canada and its ally, the Kingdom of Italy, had declared war on the United States of America.
Firenze could only watch in horror. The Italian ambassador is said to have been reduced to tears when summoned by the US President in his attempts to absolve the Italian Crown of blame for the debacle. Frantic telegrams both to Canada and the US assured that Italy was not part of any war and indeed was a neutral party in any conflict on the continent. A public apology was made by the King himself. (...) Italy's humiliation before the eyes of the international community would go a long way in further weakening its hold on the 'Continental System'. Canada, for its part, fared very poorly in the 'War of Empty Promises', with peace made quickly after American forces crossed the border in November and a swift change of power to the Canadian opposition. (...)
For all its troubles, the period saw a considerable flourishing of culture. Both radical and traditional forms of Italian art and expression gained great attention across the globe. The famed tenor Enrico Caruso's performance at the Covent Garden in London is even thought to have directly resulted in a strengthening of Italo-British relations, with British King Harold III announcing (controversially at home) that the Italians were truly 'the most cultured people on God's green Earth'. The rise of jacobinism and socialism across Europe was bringing the two monarchies closer together, with the monarchs of both nations exchanging active correspondence on the means to deal with the situation. (...) In this atmosphere, Britain also supported Italy's bid for host of the Olympic Games in 1904 - though as the 'master of Europe', this was already perhaps to be expected. (...) For Italy, the 1904 Games were not only a chance to showcase the nation's glory and athletic prowess, but also a welcome distraction from the ravages of the War and from the ever-present unrest on the streets. (...)
Demobilization and disarmament did not prevent wars, though it left them mostly in the hands of local free corps and volunteer forces. The Svealand War of 1903-1904 between Denmark and Sweden was fought with makeshift armies which only incorporated small cores of regular troops. The international community looked to Italy, the new global enforcer, to end the fighting. The conflict was too distant to nudge the government into action, however, especially as both Denmark and Sweden were merely defeated enemies and could be allowed to 'whack each other senseless' if that was what they wished. (...) The Swedish victory finally allowed relations to stabilize in Scandinavia. (...) But a crisis was coming where Italy could not simply sit and watch. (...)
The First Czechoslovak-Polish War had been fought in the final years of the Great War and ended swiftly by Italian intervention. In the years since, Czechoslovak revanchism and resentment had only grown. Though both nations remained Italian allies, Poland was by far the more valued partner in the 'Continental System'. (...) Italy's prolonged inaction emboldened the Czechoslovak military establishment. They proposed that with a 'lightning war', the matter of West Galicia could be resolved without Firenze having time to intervene. In January 1904, the government gave its blessing for the operation. Czechoslovak forces flooded over the border into West Galicia, where they met a prepared and vengeance-minded Polish defense.
This was not some overseas squabble or skirmish on the periphery. Italy's allies had began a full-scale war right across the border from Italian Austria. With Italian demands for an immediate ceasefire and negotiation falling on deaf ears, the government finally agreed to act. Czechoslovakia was the clear aggressor and had always been a troublesome friend. On January 10, 1904, Italy denounced the Czechoslovak invasion and began mobilizing forces for a 'peacekeeping operation' in Czechoslovakia. The surprised Czechoslovaks now faced a war on two fronts.
For many soldiers on both sides, it was a bitter day. Veterans who had fought side by side for years were thrown back into the grinder to murder old friends and comrades. For others, it was a chance for one last taste of glory, or for testing the new weapons from the final year of the War which had not seen true use in battle then. Even to most contemporary accounts, the War appeared a savage, senseless thing - the final proof of the death of the genteel old world, and the coming of a time of madness and death. (...)
The war effort was unsustainable for Czechoslovakia, despite its early successes against Polish forces in Galicia. (...) With the southern Czechoslovak front crumbling, Italian envoys shifted from asking for merely white peace to reparations and further demands. The chief Italian demand became the liberation of Pommerania, the small Czechoslovak satellite state on the Baltic coast - thus removing its last marginal access to the sea and suitably 'humbling' the upstart nation. (...) Instead, a pro-Italian party was to be put in power at court and a suitable Italian match found for the Duke of Pommerania. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) Argentina's anti-Communist crusade was now fully and decisively underway. The 1904 elections in Chile saw a popular front left-wing government thrust into power. Within two days, Argentine forces were marching over the border and began to drive the Chilean Army south. (...) The crushing Santiago Accords of 1904 saw the annexation of the vast majority of the Chilean Republic's territory. These 'wars for liberty' had coincidentally created the Greater Argentina which Argentine right-wing authors had advocated for decades. In the collapse of South American socialism, the age of Argentine Hegemony was being born. (...)
in Estonia, the Winter Campaign of 1903-1904 was beginning to show results. Royal forces had defeated most of the Estonian anarcho-communist forces by March, though it would take a good decade until the last bastions of these autonomists had been pulled up and returned to government control. The Russian provinces in particular were becoming increasingly hard to govern without resorting to constant excesses of brutal force. (...) The tide of Revolution had been halted in places, but it was far from over. Indeed, its greatest victory was still to come. (...)
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Seems like nationalism is on the rise. States are finally becoming the nations of people who use the same language and have similar culture instead of monarchs' personal domains
Btw. these Czechoslovaks and Canadians are so bloodthirsty attacking clearly stronger neighbours idk kinda weird...
P.S.: If you could post the culture map of Europe and Americas. I'm especially interested about Canada and Argentina. I don't remember who is majority there and I'd also want to see the German culture area you promised earlier
Btw. these Czechoslovaks and Canadians are so bloodthirsty attacking clearly stronger neighbours idk kinda weird...
P.S.: If you could post the culture map of Europe and Americas. I'm especially interested about Canada and Argentina. I don't remember who is majority there and I'd also want to see the German culture area you promised earlier
The AI is way too confident that its allies will join any war it starts. The case of Czechoslovakia is particularly bizarre, as they were launching an offensive war against another Italian ally. But the poor AI decision-making makes for a fun narrative!
Here are the nationalities.
Europe in its full glory. It's a bit funny in places. Note the Slovak sliver inside the Polish border - that's what provides the justification for all these Czechoslovak invasions of West Galicia.
A closer look at Germany. Plenty of potential for nationalist conflict here. Swiss culture also exists... in one province in Switzerland!
North America. With the assimilation bonuses new world nations get, they're practically monocultures. Canada is French-Canadian with some native and Nayeduniya (descendants of Indian colonists) holdouts in the West. The US is almost entirely Italo-Americano, with some Metis and Vinlander areas still in the North-East, and some Nayeduniya and natives in the Pacific Northwest.
Mexico is strongly Italo-Americano in the south, but with significant minority areas in the northern states of Nayeduniya and natives. Haiti in the Caribbean is Nieuwereld, so Dutch-descended. The Caribbean, a French satellite, is Nouvellien aka French-descended. The Antilles are Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean, descended from Portuguese (Bejan) settlers and slaves.
In upper South America, Colombia and Peru are Vinlander (Danish-descended), Venezuela is Novysvet (Sorb-descended), Brazil is Brazilian (so Portuguese/Bejan-descended) and Bolivia is Nieuwereld (Dutch-descended). Cumberland, which only has 646k total population at this time, is Falklander (British-descended) with significant native Aimara populations. Falklander elsewhere in Brazil has been effectively eradicated, despite once being the majority ethnicity of the region. V2's mechanics make these kind of things inevitable.
Here things get a bit chaotic. This corner of the globe has been fighting almost nonstop for Vicky 2's playtime and thus borders and cultures don't match so exactly. Argentina is Nieuwereld also, while its rival Buenos Aires is Platinean (Portuguese/Bejan-descended). Chile is Vinlander again. Everybody has a piece of everybody else in this area.
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Assimilation bonuses to new world nations are so weird. It directly contradicts how multicultural new world nations actually are ( at least in otl).
It may make sense for language only, but for cultures as combination of tradition, history, ethnicity, religious elements (although there is separate faith aspect it is also part of a culture [like atheist celebrating Christmas]) and the language it's a real oversight.
Hope Vic 3 will manage it better. Also in Vic 3 all nation would get immigrations and not only new world ones so it could be interesting as well
P.S.: In case of German unification. We can have South German Bavaria and North German new nation as North German and South German are different cultures in Vic.
Tho if I'm correct Italy have quite huge South German minority in their lands so assimilation maybe the only way to resolve it when German'll get bolder in their demads for unification.
Alternatively they can try to force narrative of South German and North German being different cultures and oppose broad German identity. They can even declare themselves the protector of South Germans, unite them all and become more successful version of Austria-Hungary
It may make sense for language only, but for cultures as combination of tradition, history, ethnicity, religious elements (although there is separate faith aspect it is also part of a culture [like atheist celebrating Christmas]) and the language it's a real oversight.
Hope Vic 3 will manage it better. Also in Vic 3 all nation would get immigrations and not only new world ones so it could be interesting as well
P.S.: In case of German unification. We can have South German Bavaria and North German new nation as North German and South German are different cultures in Vic.
Tho if I'm correct Italy have quite huge South German minority in their lands so assimilation maybe the only way to resolve it when German'll get bolder in their demads for unification.
Alternatively they can try to force narrative of South German and North German being different cultures and oppose broad German identity. They can even declare themselves the protector of South Germans, unite them all and become more successful version of Austria-Hungary
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The Kingdom of Italy, 1904-1910: The Revolt of the Masses
Excerpts from 'The War Land: Europe in the Aftermath of the Great War', written by Lars Emil Nilsen (Kobenhavn: 1990)
(...) June 1904 found the Czechoslovak position in danger of imminent collapse. While the Galician offensive still enjoyed some modest success, the war at home was being lost. The Battle of Brno on June 17-19 brought with it the operational destruction and surrender of the Czechoslovakian Southern Army. This meant that Italian forces could now operate unhindered within Czechoslovakia proper. The Czechoslovak conscript infantry had crumbled in the face of Italian combined arms. The desperate gambit of the 'White Thousands' strategem had failed; now the only remedy appeared to be to withdraw all offensive forces from Galicia and use them to repel the Italians, forfeiting West Galicia entirely. (...) But with Italian soldiers closing in around Prague and the fortification lines occupied, was this even a viable change of course? (...)
By August, the war was effectively over, but continued resistance fighting by militias and free corps units continued hostilities until September. The Peace of Katowice in late September 1904 at last ended the conflict. As part of the brief military occupation of Czechoslovakia, the pro-Czech government in Pommerania was overthrown. The Czechoslovak Prime Minister Stefanik was forced to admit the end of Czechoslovak overlordship over Pommerania and thus the loss of the final remnant of its Baltic Sea empire. Italian interests would from now on dominate in the small Baltic state. (...) The Second Galician War was over, but how long would the peace last?
(...) In France, chaos unfolded. Administrative records show constant pleas by provincial law enforcement for aid and resources. Strikes, terror bombings, lynchings, assaults on estates and other small-scale acts of rebellion were rampant. The death toll from this unrest and the brutal government crackdown is hard to pin down, but must be in the hundreds of thousands over a twenty-year period. (...) This disintegration of the Imperial state can also be seen in the emergence of myriad alternative structures of power and administration within France, ranging from the self-government of rogue provincial governors and authorities, to local military coups, to mutual-aid movements and anarchist takeovers in many townships, to the rule of workers' and peasants' councils in Communist-supporting areas. (...)
With wages in severe arrears, the loyalties of the military could not be counted upon. Soldiers and police would sell their equipment or even their services to the highest bidder, or join rebel movements outright out of ideological sympathies. The French government relied increasingly on free corps of volunteer militias, since the terms of the 'Defiler Peace' harshly limited the regular Army. For these units, and even some of the Imperial Army, it was charismatic leaders or ideological doctrines that held their loyalty, not the Emperor in Paris. While apparently loyal to the national government, these bands of soldiers essentially ruled themselves - and by doing so, they ruled much of France.
(...) We may trace the origins of the Jeune Nation in this chaotic period. Born as a reaction both against socialism and against the government's surrender in the Great War, the 'Young Nation' movement was at this stage still an awkward amalgam of different groups and ideologies. Rabid, militant nationalism provided an unifying factor, but attitudes to things such as religion, eugenics, race, women and the institution of the monarchy had yet to stabilize. Indeed, the Jeune Nation does not stand out from the mass of small reactionary and proto-fascist movements active in the war land of France.
(...) Even so, the group's 'Manifesto of Rejuvenation' in November 1904 circulated widely in reactionary newspapers. This thematically confused and ideologically muddled screed describes a France 'made decrepit and degenerate' by aristocrats, pacifists, socialists and foreign subversives, calling for a 'revitalization and rejuvenation' and an end to the rule of 'old cowardly men from their country estates'. Instead, France needed the dynamic and forward-thinking rule of the young; namely, the millions of resentful and out-of-work veterans of the Great War, who had through their struggle and sacrifice reached the ideal state of humanity. Only through them could the nation be saved from its present state of decline. (...) Similar developments were ongoing across Europe. The crash demobilization of the belligerent powers had left millions of soldiers adrift and traumatized, unwanted by homelands which now sought to embrace peace with zeal and where economic conditions were almost universally dire. The military establishment sponsored and incubated such movements, unwilling to let go of the power it had gained during the wartime years. The global Fascist system was beginning to take shape.
(...) Bavaria had sat the War out. Though it had made considerable gains with the acquisition of French Tirol and Elsass-Lothringen in 1898, many within the Kingdom saw the past years as a missed opportunity. Even as a neutral observer, Bavaria had been hit hard by the disruption of trade and arrival of countless refugees from every cardinal direction, situated as it was in the very heart of the conflict zone. To the nationalist press, the cataclysm that had passed them by had been the proving ground through which Italy and its allies had shown their national and racial supremacy. Was it not the duty of every Bavarian man to do the same, and indeed revive the dream of an united Germany?
On August 4th, 1904, the Bavarian Landtag convened in a special session. The issue on the floor was whether a new German Federation should be formed under the Bavarian King and Landtag, essentially proclaiming an intention to claim all of Germany under their banner for all the world to hear. With a 162-20 vote in favor, the Landtag accepted the resolution. Only the radical socialists of the USPB, two dissenters and a handful of independent representatives voted against the measure. It is telling that even the formally anti-war and anti-nationalistic Social Democrats voted overwhelmingly for the measure; as the unification of Germany would almost certainly demand military conflict, the SDs put aside their party principles in the overwhelming mood of war hunger. (...)
Two months after the formation of the German Federation, a final ultimatum was made to the government of Gelre - join the new union state, or face the Federation military. (...) The choice of Gelre as the primary target of any unification war had been obvious from the start. The Grand Duchy governed a majority-German population, but its society life and the administration were essentially in the hands of a small ethnic Dutch elite. The perceived of oppression of Germans under foreign rule provided an easy pretext for aggression. Gelre was also in the unenviable position of having no allies in Europe. Remaining ethnic German lands were in the hands of stronger opponents, with powerful backers: the Rhinelanders and the Sorbians were allies of Italy, and Czechoslovakia still boasted a large if recently defeated army. (...) Thus, on the 2nd of November, the German Federation issued a declaration of war against the Grand Duchy of Gelre. The War Land had come to Bavaria in full. (...)
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) November 2 1904 has been codified in liberal historiography as the day of triumph for women's rights across the globe. It is true that on that day women were given the right to vote and run for elections in the Republic of Venezuela, a first for a liberal democratic system. This narrative blatantly ignores a wide array of advances achieved by women and for women in proletarian states worldwide long before 1904. Council elections in Aotearoa had been open to women from their first inception, granting women far greater relative weight in their respective democracies. (...) Rights to abortion, divorce (indeed, the Serbian Supreme Soviet banned the institution of marriage entirely in 1901), work and leisure had been guaranteed across the Socialist sphere. Exceptions existed (especially in authoritarian centralist systems and occasionally on a local level for council republics), but on the whole the 'Red Scourge' was far ahead of the liberal world in 1904 when it came to the 'Question of Women'.
(...) The crippled Chilean nation failed to stabilize after its disastrous loss to Argentina. The popular front government had collapsed into infighting already during the war. The postwar era unfolded in distrustful, uneasy peace between its right and left wings. On the right the Chile Labor Party, which made up the social democratic majority of the coalition, resented the growing pressure from its minority partner of the Communist Party, which advocated for extreme changes and a reconstruction of the economy in a fully Socialist model to combat the financial crisis. (...) The Labor Party had run out of time. In the summer of 1905, high-level military officials met with the President and issued an ultimatum: remove the Communists from government, or be toppled by military coup. (...)
To say this move backfired would be an understatement. The Communist Party demanded an immediate general strike in protest at this interference by the Army in the nation's government. The call was taken up, with radicalized workers going further and seizing factories from their owners. Military defections bolstered their forces, with mutinous soldiers refusing to attack their class comrades. (...) In August, much of the country was under the control of Communist-dominated councils. President Nielsen stepped down in October with Communist militias swarming the capital during his final speech. The Revolution was complete, with the Chilean Council Republic declared on October 28 1905. The new Communist regime was now faced with the task of reforming a nation marked by widespread poverty, corruption, illiteracy and reactionary opposition. Like so often was the case in South America in this period, these challenges would call for sacrifice - and democratic ideals would the first to go here all the same. (...)
Excerpts from 'The War Land: Europe in the Aftermath of the Great War', written by Lars Emil Nilsen (Kobenhavn: 1990)
(...) The Great War had witnessed periods of trench warfare, but for the most part it had been a war of mobility and maneuver. Now Europe was to experience the first true 'trench war'. The German-Gelrean conflict had begun in November with a strong push by Gelrean forces into the Federation. Three days of swift advance were stopped at Würzburg, and for six long months no significant ground was gained by either power. Temporary, makeshift fortifications made roots and grew into extensive systems of trench and bunker. Destructive artillery barrages reduced the picturesque cultural and natural splendor of the war zone into a lifeless mulch of no-man's-land. Bombing attacks with incendiaries by airships torched miles of pristine forest and burned down dozens of towns and settlements.
The stalemate gnawed at the public support for the war. (...) Two much-needed breakthroughs had been achieved by the spring, but not on the frontlines. First, the entrance of Britain into the war as German ally - if a distant one, promising only a naval blockade and monetary aid to the Federation - pushed the balance of power in the Federation's favor. Secondly, a Federation delegation arrived in late March in the Rhineland and was received by the Rhenish counterparts, who proved cautiously willing to offer their own assistance. Such talks could only be held in secret. The Rhineland's foreign policy was slaved to Italian desires, as the 'nation' was still effectively a satellite of Italy and its Continental System.
(...) Finally, in May 1906, the secret negotiations paid fruit. The Confederation of the Rhine, on the pretext of invasion by Gelrean forces, declared war upon Gelre and marched its forces across the much longer Rhenish border. Italy showed no interest in intervening. With its defenses circumvented in this manner, the fortified Gelrean line was made irrelevant within the week. (...) The co-belligerents - no official alliance was ever formulated - concluded the war in September 1906, dictating harsh terms to their defeated foe. Gelre would cede Hessen to the German Federation and disputed areas of the Rhineland to the Rhenish Confederation. In addition, Gelre would admit German hegemony over the region and institute wide-ranging reforms ensuring autonomy and exemption from the draft for all ethnic Germans within Gelre; a massive international humiliation and the beginning of the end for the Grand Duchy. (...)
German unification was one step closer to reality - but what would become of the two German nations who had fought side by side against Gelre? In private, the Rhenish government expressed its sympathies towards the idea of one German nation, but also made it clear that no union could be contemplated 'while the Man in Firenze still holds our reins'. (...)
Old Norse inscription in the doorway of the 'Mount Erebus Vault' in Antarctica, discovered and translated in 2021
This refuge took a great deal of time, effort and lives to build. You need not be concerned about skeletons in the foundations. The lives were mine, spent one after the other.
I arrived here in the Year 1906, one of the lost souls of the Grimaldi Expedition. I had enlisted as a Norwegian veteran of the northern polar expeditions. When the ships ran aground in the Imperial Bay, I went overboard with the clothes on my back and a handful of tools. It is with these that I began to build this place.
I came here to sate my own curiosity, and to prepare the way for another. The Wanderer shall find his way here in the end.
If you find these words, I rejoice! As I carve them, the Hunt for the Southern Pole has given the world nothing but madness and doomed lives. Yet the world changes at a loathsome pace. When your ships and flying things and whatever else at last arrive here, they will be as the chariots of the gods to me and my time.
In the name of the old gods, who I alone now recall,
Ragnar
Excerpts from 'The Imperial Histories: Vol XII, High Imperial Persia', written by Akbar Ali Khatami (Tabriz: 1942)
(...) The Shah had moved too quickly in the campaign to modernize Somalia. Mohammad Khan's ambitious reforms had stripped the old landowning classes of their power and replaced them with a system of rational administration by provincial governors. The poorly educated local imams had been suppressed with the arrival of learned Persian teachers in the territory, whose efforts to root out syncreticism and heterodox doctrine were at last starting to bear fruit by the early 1900s. Investment in the country's railways and port infrastructure had opened Somalia up as a modern market, and land enclosures and urbanization lifted the Somali people out of fundamentally inefficient traditional forms of economic activity. (...)
The anti-Persian movement was composed of various bandit groups and displaced warlords driven into the hinterlands by Persian gendarmes and garrison forces. These throwbacks to a more savage age were supported by the remnants of the old social elites and their followers. Rebellious religious leaders also aided the rebellion, inciting ignorant peasantry into revolt against their benefactors. (...) In September 1906, these conspirators banded together and launched their revolt, claiming to be fighting on behalf of the abdicated Emperor Abdiweli III - who presently enjoyed a luxurious life in Tabriz as a guest of Shah Mohammad Khan.
(...) Atrocities against loyalist Somalis were common and rebel forces ruled through brutal repression rather than with any real degree of alleged popular support. (...) The Revolt's military forces were small and inferior in every respect to local Persian auxiliaries and regular troops. Misguided and deceived peasants formed militias which proved difficult to bring to direct engagement. As a result, Persian authorities were forced into mass executions of suspected collaborators in afflicted areas to demoralize these guerillas. (...) All engagements between Persian and rebel forces resulted in swift Persian victory. Light infantry armed with new Nikzad bolt-action rifles could eliminate insurgents long before their opponents reached combat range with their obsolete foreign-supplied rifles. The Nizkad cemented its place as the primary rifle of the Persian Imperial Army. The glowing appraisals written by foreign observers smoothed the way for the Nizkad's introduction to foreign markets as well, and ended any misapprehensions about Persia's capabilities for war. (...)
In late December, the leaders of the rebel movement offered their surrender. Sporadic guerilla attacks continued for some time after, but these were of little consequence. (...) Some misguided Somalis today choose to see the Revolt in a positive light and portray it as a struggle for freedom. It is the hope of this author that their narrative of the conflict will be enough to show these malcontents the truth and make a full account of the benefits that Persia has brought to Africa throughout the turbulent century. (...)
The Persian Empire had not dirtied its hands in the Great War, which unfortunately had led to many in high positions to doubt the supremacy of Persian arms on the battlefield. The Somalian conflict eased these concerns: the remaining doubts about the Imperial Army would be fully disproven in the Macedonian War of 1908. Acting in support of their Wallachian allies, Persian forces would be mobilized against Greek aggression and reclaim the Caucasus in a successful liberation war, as detailed in the next chapter. (...)
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) It was the Golden Age of Firenze. The most recent Golden Age of Firenze, many at the time would say, given the rich history of the capital. In retrospect, it was certainly the last Golden Age of Firenze before the present day. The nonstop flourishing of architecture, literature, painting, music and theatre by both bourgeois and radical authors was staggering. The recently relaxed press restrictions allowed for an unprecedented growth in publications. The sheer volume left state censors, who had been tasked with suppressing everything dangerous to the status quo, helpless. Rather than seek to control the deluge, the censorship bureau engaged in crass distortion and fabrication of their own records to appease their masters, only striking out at the most public of new releases. (...)
Wealth flowed into the city as the heart of an empire. Twin spheres of economic domination - one over the colonies, the other over Europe in the form of the Continental System - were making Italian businessmen and corrupt government officials rich beyond their wildest dreams. (...) The government's desperate need to reduce unemployment and redirect the energies of radicalized veterans led to countless monumental constructions and public works projects, funneling treasury money into the expensive beautification of the capital. (...)
But such 'bribes' could not delay the inevitable forever. The expansion of freedoms for the press, a concession to powerful liberal interests, sparked a counter-reaction among the already volatile reactionary right. Appalled aristocrats and officers saw the deluge of 'jacobinist, socialist, anarchist and pacifist trash' in the newspapers and bookstores and knew that something had to be done. The Cogni Conspiracy was born. (...) This association of aristocratic military officers and bureaucrats intended to 'save' the King from his poisonous liberal advisors and restore what they thought of as the 'disciplined' culture of pre-War Italy. A mass purge of liberals and socialists was in order, followed by the restoration of the old penal code and all its draconian punishments. A cabinet of military officials would form to oversee these necessary evils. (...) Cogni and his allies sought to use proto-fascist veterans' organizations to agitate and organize troops to supply the manpower to suppress any socialist and liberal militants in the country during this 'restoration'. In secret, these new Italian free corps were also expected to battle regular units of the Italian Army if necessary.
(...) The plot came to light on December 20 through the investigative journalism of reporter Gabriella Torriani, ironically a feat which would have been impossible before the relaxation of press censorship; while Torriani's articles offered only circumstantial evidence and failed to identify Cogni as the mastermind of the plot, its publication sent the conspirators into a panic. Cogni attempted to flee the city and was apprehended by suspicious police. The letters found in his possession incriminated him and his closest allies beyond any reasonable doubt. (...) Despite these grave setbacks, Antonio Gramaglia, a junior Italian Army officer of no great standing within the conspiracy, gave the signal to begin an uprising to the plot's supporters.
The conspirators had expected perhaps 20,000 men at their disposal, but their agitators had overdone themselves. A series of riots and revolts broke out across Italy and spread quickly into the colonies; many with confused motives beyond an opposition to 'the socialists', who had been 'allowed to forment anarchy' by the treacherous liberal government for too long. Most significant of these was the March of the Forty Thousand in Rome - an occupation of the Eternal City by a division of the regular Army and its free corps allies. (...) However, the hoped-for support within the Italian Army failed to materialize. A communications blackout was quickly put into effect by loyalist leaders and troops generally failed to learn of this 'veterans' uprising' before it was already over. Even where word slipped through, sympathies for the revolt were modest - unlike the demobilized veterans, the self-perceived elites of the Army enjoyed stable pay and proud traditions. What reason could they have to join what appeared to be an attempt at overthrowing the King's rightful government?
(...) By January, the Revolt was over. The aristocratic conspirators were disgraced and their families put under close supervision. The Crown surmised that the danger was past and that the rot in this respect was now gone. The real lesson was not heeded. The Winter Revolt was not a show of force by aristocratic power and traditional conservative elements, but rather a display of just what a mass movement of the radicalized masses were capable of. The veterans' organizations and gangs which had provided the 'muscle' for the uprising were not weakened in the slightest. Indeed, they had gained a new awareness of their own strength. (...)
Foreign entanglements drew the attention of government in October 1909. The defeat of Gelre in the First German Unification War had plunged the Grand Duchy into a 'permanent crisis', a situation which its neighbors sought to take full advantage of. King Goffredo of Italy had considered Gelre an useful balance in the region, but its present weakness convinced him to end Italian support for Gelrean sovereignty. Representatives of the Sorbian government quickly approached Italy to ask for a blessing for an invasion of Gelrean Hannover, a region which some modest Sorb populations. These envoys left with guarantees of Italian support in any conflict. (...)
One reason for this quick Italian approval of the plan came from the active Socialist insurgency within Gelre. Revolutionary guerillas had engaged in low-intensity yet constant attacks on government forces and institutions since the previous summer. The inability of the Gelrean government to put down this rebellion suggested that a Red takeover was likely. With Hungary undergoing its own Socialist revolution at the same time, Italian interests were in checking the expansion of this revolutionary fervor where they could. (...) Italo-Sorbian forces penetrating into Gelre thus were forced to contend not only with the armed forces of Gelre's government, but equally with Socialist Red Guards in much of the country. (...)
Gelre offered its surrender in February 1910, ceding the disputed region. Sorbia had won itself land, population and a profitable industrial center and port. Gelre's state forces lay in disarray. Having suffered its second defeat within a short time, faith in the bourgeois-democratic government and the constitutional monarchy collapsed. The very Socialist takeover that Italy had sought to suppress now appeared almost certain to succeed. (...) The Gelrean Revolution was completed in the following year, thrusting yet another state into the rapidly growing Socialist fraternity of nations. (...)
(...) June 1904 found the Czechoslovak position in danger of imminent collapse. While the Galician offensive still enjoyed some modest success, the war at home was being lost. The Battle of Brno on June 17-19 brought with it the operational destruction and surrender of the Czechoslovakian Southern Army. This meant that Italian forces could now operate unhindered within Czechoslovakia proper. The Czechoslovak conscript infantry had crumbled in the face of Italian combined arms. The desperate gambit of the 'White Thousands' strategem had failed; now the only remedy appeared to be to withdraw all offensive forces from Galicia and use them to repel the Italians, forfeiting West Galicia entirely. (...) But with Italian soldiers closing in around Prague and the fortification lines occupied, was this even a viable change of course? (...)
By August, the war was effectively over, but continued resistance fighting by militias and free corps units continued hostilities until September. The Peace of Katowice in late September 1904 at last ended the conflict. As part of the brief military occupation of Czechoslovakia, the pro-Czech government in Pommerania was overthrown. The Czechoslovak Prime Minister Stefanik was forced to admit the end of Czechoslovak overlordship over Pommerania and thus the loss of the final remnant of its Baltic Sea empire. Italian interests would from now on dominate in the small Baltic state. (...) The Second Galician War was over, but how long would the peace last?
(...) In France, chaos unfolded. Administrative records show constant pleas by provincial law enforcement for aid and resources. Strikes, terror bombings, lynchings, assaults on estates and other small-scale acts of rebellion were rampant. The death toll from this unrest and the brutal government crackdown is hard to pin down, but must be in the hundreds of thousands over a twenty-year period. (...) This disintegration of the Imperial state can also be seen in the emergence of myriad alternative structures of power and administration within France, ranging from the self-government of rogue provincial governors and authorities, to local military coups, to mutual-aid movements and anarchist takeovers in many townships, to the rule of workers' and peasants' councils in Communist-supporting areas. (...)
With wages in severe arrears, the loyalties of the military could not be counted upon. Soldiers and police would sell their equipment or even their services to the highest bidder, or join rebel movements outright out of ideological sympathies. The French government relied increasingly on free corps of volunteer militias, since the terms of the 'Defiler Peace' harshly limited the regular Army. For these units, and even some of the Imperial Army, it was charismatic leaders or ideological doctrines that held their loyalty, not the Emperor in Paris. While apparently loyal to the national government, these bands of soldiers essentially ruled themselves - and by doing so, they ruled much of France.
(...) We may trace the origins of the Jeune Nation in this chaotic period. Born as a reaction both against socialism and against the government's surrender in the Great War, the 'Young Nation' movement was at this stage still an awkward amalgam of different groups and ideologies. Rabid, militant nationalism provided an unifying factor, but attitudes to things such as religion, eugenics, race, women and the institution of the monarchy had yet to stabilize. Indeed, the Jeune Nation does not stand out from the mass of small reactionary and proto-fascist movements active in the war land of France.
(...) Even so, the group's 'Manifesto of Rejuvenation' in November 1904 circulated widely in reactionary newspapers. This thematically confused and ideologically muddled screed describes a France 'made decrepit and degenerate' by aristocrats, pacifists, socialists and foreign subversives, calling for a 'revitalization and rejuvenation' and an end to the rule of 'old cowardly men from their country estates'. Instead, France needed the dynamic and forward-thinking rule of the young; namely, the millions of resentful and out-of-work veterans of the Great War, who had through their struggle and sacrifice reached the ideal state of humanity. Only through them could the nation be saved from its present state of decline. (...) Similar developments were ongoing across Europe. The crash demobilization of the belligerent powers had left millions of soldiers adrift and traumatized, unwanted by homelands which now sought to embrace peace with zeal and where economic conditions were almost universally dire. The military establishment sponsored and incubated such movements, unwilling to let go of the power it had gained during the wartime years. The global Fascist system was beginning to take shape.
(...) Bavaria had sat the War out. Though it had made considerable gains with the acquisition of French Tirol and Elsass-Lothringen in 1898, many within the Kingdom saw the past years as a missed opportunity. Even as a neutral observer, Bavaria had been hit hard by the disruption of trade and arrival of countless refugees from every cardinal direction, situated as it was in the very heart of the conflict zone. To the nationalist press, the cataclysm that had passed them by had been the proving ground through which Italy and its allies had shown their national and racial supremacy. Was it not the duty of every Bavarian man to do the same, and indeed revive the dream of an united Germany?
On August 4th, 1904, the Bavarian Landtag convened in a special session. The issue on the floor was whether a new German Federation should be formed under the Bavarian King and Landtag, essentially proclaiming an intention to claim all of Germany under their banner for all the world to hear. With a 162-20 vote in favor, the Landtag accepted the resolution. Only the radical socialists of the USPB, two dissenters and a handful of independent representatives voted against the measure. It is telling that even the formally anti-war and anti-nationalistic Social Democrats voted overwhelmingly for the measure; as the unification of Germany would almost certainly demand military conflict, the SDs put aside their party principles in the overwhelming mood of war hunger. (...)
Two months after the formation of the German Federation, a final ultimatum was made to the government of Gelre - join the new union state, or face the Federation military. (...) The choice of Gelre as the primary target of any unification war had been obvious from the start. The Grand Duchy governed a majority-German population, but its society life and the administration were essentially in the hands of a small ethnic Dutch elite. The perceived of oppression of Germans under foreign rule provided an easy pretext for aggression. Gelre was also in the unenviable position of having no allies in Europe. Remaining ethnic German lands were in the hands of stronger opponents, with powerful backers: the Rhinelanders and the Sorbians were allies of Italy, and Czechoslovakia still boasted a large if recently defeated army. (...) Thus, on the 2nd of November, the German Federation issued a declaration of war against the Grand Duchy of Gelre. The War Land had come to Bavaria in full. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) November 2 1904 has been codified in liberal historiography as the day of triumph for women's rights across the globe. It is true that on that day women were given the right to vote and run for elections in the Republic of Venezuela, a first for a liberal democratic system. This narrative blatantly ignores a wide array of advances achieved by women and for women in proletarian states worldwide long before 1904. Council elections in Aotearoa had been open to women from their first inception, granting women far greater relative weight in their respective democracies. (...) Rights to abortion, divorce (indeed, the Serbian Supreme Soviet banned the institution of marriage entirely in 1901), work and leisure had been guaranteed across the Socialist sphere. Exceptions existed (especially in authoritarian centralist systems and occasionally on a local level for council republics), but on the whole the 'Red Scourge' was far ahead of the liberal world in 1904 when it came to the 'Question of Women'.
(...) The crippled Chilean nation failed to stabilize after its disastrous loss to Argentina. The popular front government had collapsed into infighting already during the war. The postwar era unfolded in distrustful, uneasy peace between its right and left wings. On the right the Chile Labor Party, which made up the social democratic majority of the coalition, resented the growing pressure from its minority partner of the Communist Party, which advocated for extreme changes and a reconstruction of the economy in a fully Socialist model to combat the financial crisis. (...) The Labor Party had run out of time. In the summer of 1905, high-level military officials met with the President and issued an ultimatum: remove the Communists from government, or be toppled by military coup. (...)
To say this move backfired would be an understatement. The Communist Party demanded an immediate general strike in protest at this interference by the Army in the nation's government. The call was taken up, with radicalized workers going further and seizing factories from their owners. Military defections bolstered their forces, with mutinous soldiers refusing to attack their class comrades. (...) In August, much of the country was under the control of Communist-dominated councils. President Nielsen stepped down in October with Communist militias swarming the capital during his final speech. The Revolution was complete, with the Chilean Council Republic declared on October 28 1905. The new Communist regime was now faced with the task of reforming a nation marked by widespread poverty, corruption, illiteracy and reactionary opposition. Like so often was the case in South America in this period, these challenges would call for sacrifice - and democratic ideals would the first to go here all the same. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'The War Land: Europe in the Aftermath of the Great War', written by Lars Emil Nilsen (Kobenhavn: 1990)
(...) The Great War had witnessed periods of trench warfare, but for the most part it had been a war of mobility and maneuver. Now Europe was to experience the first true 'trench war'. The German-Gelrean conflict had begun in November with a strong push by Gelrean forces into the Federation. Three days of swift advance were stopped at Würzburg, and for six long months no significant ground was gained by either power. Temporary, makeshift fortifications made roots and grew into extensive systems of trench and bunker. Destructive artillery barrages reduced the picturesque cultural and natural splendor of the war zone into a lifeless mulch of no-man's-land. Bombing attacks with incendiaries by airships torched miles of pristine forest and burned down dozens of towns and settlements.
The stalemate gnawed at the public support for the war. (...) Two much-needed breakthroughs had been achieved by the spring, but not on the frontlines. First, the entrance of Britain into the war as German ally - if a distant one, promising only a naval blockade and monetary aid to the Federation - pushed the balance of power in the Federation's favor. Secondly, a Federation delegation arrived in late March in the Rhineland and was received by the Rhenish counterparts, who proved cautiously willing to offer their own assistance. Such talks could only be held in secret. The Rhineland's foreign policy was slaved to Italian desires, as the 'nation' was still effectively a satellite of Italy and its Continental System.
(...) Finally, in May 1906, the secret negotiations paid fruit. The Confederation of the Rhine, on the pretext of invasion by Gelrean forces, declared war upon Gelre and marched its forces across the much longer Rhenish border. Italy showed no interest in intervening. With its defenses circumvented in this manner, the fortified Gelrean line was made irrelevant within the week. (...) The co-belligerents - no official alliance was ever formulated - concluded the war in September 1906, dictating harsh terms to their defeated foe. Gelre would cede Hessen to the German Federation and disputed areas of the Rhineland to the Rhenish Confederation. In addition, Gelre would admit German hegemony over the region and institute wide-ranging reforms ensuring autonomy and exemption from the draft for all ethnic Germans within Gelre; a massive international humiliation and the beginning of the end for the Grand Duchy. (...)
German unification was one step closer to reality - but what would become of the two German nations who had fought side by side against Gelre? In private, the Rhenish government expressed its sympathies towards the idea of one German nation, but also made it clear that no union could be contemplated 'while the Man in Firenze still holds our reins'. (...)
***
Old Norse inscription in the doorway of the 'Mount Erebus Vault' in Antarctica, discovered and translated in 2021
This refuge took a great deal of time, effort and lives to build. You need not be concerned about skeletons in the foundations. The lives were mine, spent one after the other.
I arrived here in the Year 1906, one of the lost souls of the Grimaldi Expedition. I had enlisted as a Norwegian veteran of the northern polar expeditions. When the ships ran aground in the Imperial Bay, I went overboard with the clothes on my back and a handful of tools. It is with these that I began to build this place.
I came here to sate my own curiosity, and to prepare the way for another. The Wanderer shall find his way here in the end.
If you find these words, I rejoice! As I carve them, the Hunt for the Southern Pole has given the world nothing but madness and doomed lives. Yet the world changes at a loathsome pace. When your ships and flying things and whatever else at last arrive here, they will be as the chariots of the gods to me and my time.
In the name of the old gods, who I alone now recall,
Ragnar
***
Excerpts from 'The Imperial Histories: Vol XII, High Imperial Persia', written by Akbar Ali Khatami (Tabriz: 1942)
(...) The Shah had moved too quickly in the campaign to modernize Somalia. Mohammad Khan's ambitious reforms had stripped the old landowning classes of their power and replaced them with a system of rational administration by provincial governors. The poorly educated local imams had been suppressed with the arrival of learned Persian teachers in the territory, whose efforts to root out syncreticism and heterodox doctrine were at last starting to bear fruit by the early 1900s. Investment in the country's railways and port infrastructure had opened Somalia up as a modern market, and land enclosures and urbanization lifted the Somali people out of fundamentally inefficient traditional forms of economic activity. (...)
The anti-Persian movement was composed of various bandit groups and displaced warlords driven into the hinterlands by Persian gendarmes and garrison forces. These throwbacks to a more savage age were supported by the remnants of the old social elites and their followers. Rebellious religious leaders also aided the rebellion, inciting ignorant peasantry into revolt against their benefactors. (...) In September 1906, these conspirators banded together and launched their revolt, claiming to be fighting on behalf of the abdicated Emperor Abdiweli III - who presently enjoyed a luxurious life in Tabriz as a guest of Shah Mohammad Khan.
(...) Atrocities against loyalist Somalis were common and rebel forces ruled through brutal repression rather than with any real degree of alleged popular support. (...) The Revolt's military forces were small and inferior in every respect to local Persian auxiliaries and regular troops. Misguided and deceived peasants formed militias which proved difficult to bring to direct engagement. As a result, Persian authorities were forced into mass executions of suspected collaborators in afflicted areas to demoralize these guerillas. (...) All engagements between Persian and rebel forces resulted in swift Persian victory. Light infantry armed with new Nikzad bolt-action rifles could eliminate insurgents long before their opponents reached combat range with their obsolete foreign-supplied rifles. The Nizkad cemented its place as the primary rifle of the Persian Imperial Army. The glowing appraisals written by foreign observers smoothed the way for the Nizkad's introduction to foreign markets as well, and ended any misapprehensions about Persia's capabilities for war. (...)
In late December, the leaders of the rebel movement offered their surrender. Sporadic guerilla attacks continued for some time after, but these were of little consequence. (...) Some misguided Somalis today choose to see the Revolt in a positive light and portray it as a struggle for freedom. It is the hope of this author that their narrative of the conflict will be enough to show these malcontents the truth and make a full account of the benefits that Persia has brought to Africa throughout the turbulent century. (...)
The Persian Empire had not dirtied its hands in the Great War, which unfortunately had led to many in high positions to doubt the supremacy of Persian arms on the battlefield. The Somalian conflict eased these concerns: the remaining doubts about the Imperial Army would be fully disproven in the Macedonian War of 1908. Acting in support of their Wallachian allies, Persian forces would be mobilized against Greek aggression and reclaim the Caucasus in a successful liberation war, as detailed in the next chapter. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) It was the Golden Age of Firenze. The most recent Golden Age of Firenze, many at the time would say, given the rich history of the capital. In retrospect, it was certainly the last Golden Age of Firenze before the present day. The nonstop flourishing of architecture, literature, painting, music and theatre by both bourgeois and radical authors was staggering. The recently relaxed press restrictions allowed for an unprecedented growth in publications. The sheer volume left state censors, who had been tasked with suppressing everything dangerous to the status quo, helpless. Rather than seek to control the deluge, the censorship bureau engaged in crass distortion and fabrication of their own records to appease their masters, only striking out at the most public of new releases. (...)
Wealth flowed into the city as the heart of an empire. Twin spheres of economic domination - one over the colonies, the other over Europe in the form of the Continental System - were making Italian businessmen and corrupt government officials rich beyond their wildest dreams. (...) The government's desperate need to reduce unemployment and redirect the energies of radicalized veterans led to countless monumental constructions and public works projects, funneling treasury money into the expensive beautification of the capital. (...)
But such 'bribes' could not delay the inevitable forever. The expansion of freedoms for the press, a concession to powerful liberal interests, sparked a counter-reaction among the already volatile reactionary right. Appalled aristocrats and officers saw the deluge of 'jacobinist, socialist, anarchist and pacifist trash' in the newspapers and bookstores and knew that something had to be done. The Cogni Conspiracy was born. (...) This association of aristocratic military officers and bureaucrats intended to 'save' the King from his poisonous liberal advisors and restore what they thought of as the 'disciplined' culture of pre-War Italy. A mass purge of liberals and socialists was in order, followed by the restoration of the old penal code and all its draconian punishments. A cabinet of military officials would form to oversee these necessary evils. (...) Cogni and his allies sought to use proto-fascist veterans' organizations to agitate and organize troops to supply the manpower to suppress any socialist and liberal militants in the country during this 'restoration'. In secret, these new Italian free corps were also expected to battle regular units of the Italian Army if necessary.
(...) The plot came to light on December 20 through the investigative journalism of reporter Gabriella Torriani, ironically a feat which would have been impossible before the relaxation of press censorship; while Torriani's articles offered only circumstantial evidence and failed to identify Cogni as the mastermind of the plot, its publication sent the conspirators into a panic. Cogni attempted to flee the city and was apprehended by suspicious police. The letters found in his possession incriminated him and his closest allies beyond any reasonable doubt. (...) Despite these grave setbacks, Antonio Gramaglia, a junior Italian Army officer of no great standing within the conspiracy, gave the signal to begin an uprising to the plot's supporters.
The conspirators had expected perhaps 20,000 men at their disposal, but their agitators had overdone themselves. A series of riots and revolts broke out across Italy and spread quickly into the colonies; many with confused motives beyond an opposition to 'the socialists', who had been 'allowed to forment anarchy' by the treacherous liberal government for too long. Most significant of these was the March of the Forty Thousand in Rome - an occupation of the Eternal City by a division of the regular Army and its free corps allies. (...) However, the hoped-for support within the Italian Army failed to materialize. A communications blackout was quickly put into effect by loyalist leaders and troops generally failed to learn of this 'veterans' uprising' before it was already over. Even where word slipped through, sympathies for the revolt were modest - unlike the demobilized veterans, the self-perceived elites of the Army enjoyed stable pay and proud traditions. What reason could they have to join what appeared to be an attempt at overthrowing the King's rightful government?
(...) By January, the Revolt was over. The aristocratic conspirators were disgraced and their families put under close supervision. The Crown surmised that the danger was past and that the rot in this respect was now gone. The real lesson was not heeded. The Winter Revolt was not a show of force by aristocratic power and traditional conservative elements, but rather a display of just what a mass movement of the radicalized masses were capable of. The veterans' organizations and gangs which had provided the 'muscle' for the uprising were not weakened in the slightest. Indeed, they had gained a new awareness of their own strength. (...)
Foreign entanglements drew the attention of government in October 1909. The defeat of Gelre in the First German Unification War had plunged the Grand Duchy into a 'permanent crisis', a situation which its neighbors sought to take full advantage of. King Goffredo of Italy had considered Gelre an useful balance in the region, but its present weakness convinced him to end Italian support for Gelrean sovereignty. Representatives of the Sorbian government quickly approached Italy to ask for a blessing for an invasion of Gelrean Hannover, a region which some modest Sorb populations. These envoys left with guarantees of Italian support in any conflict. (...)
One reason for this quick Italian approval of the plan came from the active Socialist insurgency within Gelre. Revolutionary guerillas had engaged in low-intensity yet constant attacks on government forces and institutions since the previous summer. The inability of the Gelrean government to put down this rebellion suggested that a Red takeover was likely. With Hungary undergoing its own Socialist revolution at the same time, Italian interests were in checking the expansion of this revolutionary fervor where they could. (...) Italo-Sorbian forces penetrating into Gelre thus were forced to contend not only with the armed forces of Gelre's government, but equally with Socialist Red Guards in much of the country. (...)
Gelre offered its surrender in February 1910, ceding the disputed region. Sorbia had won itself land, population and a profitable industrial center and port. Gelre's state forces lay in disarray. Having suffered its second defeat within a short time, faith in the bourgeois-democratic government and the constitutional monarchy collapsed. The very Socialist takeover that Italy had sought to suppress now appeared almost certain to succeed. (...) The Gelrean Revolution was completed in the following year, thrusting yet another state into the rapidly growing Socialist fraternity of nations. (...)
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I don't know if you've been cleaning them up but I really like how clean the borders are here. They all feel like borders countries would realistically have, rather than the bordergore we can get from some megacampaigns.
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This mega campaign has created a bunch of decent looking countries, its true. Though the new world always looks fairly otl due to game limitations.
South Germans United, but it's only a stepstone between final German Unification just as predicted
Honestly I don't know if you are forcing these events? Only recently when I asked if Bavaria wants to unite Germans you said "it won't be easy". Looks pretty easy for now
Honestly I don't know if you are forcing these events? Only recently when I asked if Bavaria wants to unite Germans you said "it won't be easy". Looks pretty easy for now
I clean up borders fairly often, yes. The Great War required a lot of manual editing in particular to simulate a Versailles-style large-scale reordering of the world situation. I don't do so arbitrarily, though - I'm expanding upon and finalizing things that happen without my involvement, like cleaning up any enclaves of territory left after an AI conquest.
The HoI4 conversion gets weird if states are divided between too many countries, so that prompts editing sometimes too. I try to do so in a balanced manner when cleaning the borders of two nations, so that both lose/gain the same amount - if the change would be too radical, I just leave it be. The partition of Buenos Aires into two nonsensically separated halves is one example where I've let the AI's dirty work be.
South Germans United, but it's only a stepstone between final German Unification just as predicted
Honestly I don't know if you are forcing these events? Only recently when I asked if Bavaria wants to unite Germans you said "it won't be easy". Looks pretty easy for now
I didn't really help Bavaria out here, so that's all AI work. The war was genuinely a stalemate that Gelre could have won up until the moment the Rhineland declared a separate war against it and their defense effort collapsed.
Plus like the narrative states, Gelre was the easiest foe Germany would need to face. Defeating the Italian-backed states militarily is beyond the Federation's means right now.
There is one instance coming up where I do quite literally force an in-game event, but I think it makes sense in-universe. I can point it out when it happens.
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Here's to Gelre meeting a terrible fate so it can stop haunting my nightmares.
I take the same approach for my grand campaigns where I accept decisions the AI have made but editorialize them so they aren't as nonsensical. Like "you look ridiculous if you annex that state, let's swap some land out so it looks nicer" Honestly makes me hopeful Vic3 won't have the "you can't annex the capital state" rule.
Of course most editing I do is going from EU4 to Vic2 because especially in the new world a lot of states go really wonky and contiguous borders become weird exclaves.
I take the same approach for my grand campaigns where I accept decisions the AI have made but editorialize them so they aren't as nonsensical. Like "you look ridiculous if you annex that state, let's swap some land out so it looks nicer" Honestly makes me hopeful Vic3 won't have the "you can't annex the capital state" rule.
Of course most editing I do is going from EU4 to Vic2 because especially in the new world a lot of states go really wonky and contiguous borders become weird exclaves.
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The Kingdom of Italy, 1910-1920: Warning Shots
Excerpts from 'The Failure of Liberal Democracy: an Argument', written by Pavel Konstantinovich Kornilov (Vladimir: 1970)
(...) That there was a crisis is undeniable. It was a crisis of the jacobin cause; of liberal democratic internationalism; of revolutionary liberalism as a whole. The destructive rise of Communism around the world was a bitter pill to swallow for the veterans of the jacobinist struggle. Their gentlemen's clubs and secret societies could not compete in numbers or appeal with the Left. Senseless devotion to reformism within absolutist systems of government had sapped the revolutionary potential of these parties. The popular masses they might have mobilized had been subverted and co-opted by the extremists of the Left. (...)
In Italy, the last desperate gasp of the old guard of Italian jacobins - the so-called Radical Republicans - came in 1910. This revolutionary liberal faction was led by the secret society of the Carbonari, a comfortably middle-to-upper-class institution with elaborate occult-esoteric practices and high-minded ideals. (...) Its popular support came mainly from the Napoli-based Masaniellist organizations, which owed their success to deep-seated regionalist pride and long history of republicanism in the South, the heritage of the failed 1640 Neapolitan Republic. These populist-liberal organizations had off-shoots in most major cities of Italy. (...) In the colonies, educated elites also supported the revolutionary liberal cause in the hopes that it would win their homelands representation in Firenze. (...)
The 1910 Risings began with anti-war riots in February 1910 in northern cities. Italian support of Sorbia in the Sorb-Gelrean War of 1910 had been unpopular and fears of renewed conscription now sent thousands into the streets. Composed largely of students and lower middle-class activists, these demonstrators demanded an end to absolutist rule: a constitution, universal suffrage, an elected senate, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech, expression and religion, guarantees to the rights of property, and reform of the military to cleanse it of 'causeless tyranny and draconian justice'. (...) The brutal government crackdown of February 15 sparked even wider demonstrations in previously unaffected cities. The Republicans saw their chance to act. The long-neglected weapon stores and bomb-making depots were opened back up as thousands of fervent jacobins took to the streets. (...)
Naples inevitably became the revolutionary heartland. The republicans framed their revolt in nationalist terms, which won them broad popular support in the South. Resentment at 'Northern Tyranny' had always fueled unrest in the region, now more than ever. Mechanization and commercialization of agriculture had caused widespread unemployment and poverty in the largely agrarian South. Naples itself was an industrial center, but one which had resisted the siren song of the extreme Left and instead largely supported the Italian Social Democrats. The Rising in Naples thus saw an alliance of liberal republicans and social democrats. The Revolutionary Socialists, on the other hand, were considered just as much an enemy as the tyrannical state. There would be no support from the communists for the Risings.
(...) The New Republican Army swelled to nearly 65,000 men in February-March 1910. They began extending their control over the city and its environs. Leaders in the city itself declared 'the Second Neapolitan Republic' on March 4th. With news of uprisings across the nation, the success of the revolution appeared only a few steps away.(...)
The illusion could not be maintained. The Risings had been small and fragmented in the North. The Army failed to manifest any liberal sympathies. Indeed, it appears to have leapt at the chance to crush the rebel forces. Brutal repression and state terror followed in the wake of republican defeats. (...) On March 10th, the loyalist III. Army swept into Naples and engaged the New Republican Army. Now the obsolete armaments and poor organization of the republican forces was made evident. (...) The surrender of the rebel command did not end the bloodshed. Executions of suspected republicans continued for over a week, with a death toll of at least 80,000 people. (...)
In mid-March, the Risings were over. Colonial disturbances continued until May, but only to meet similar ends. The liberal revolutionary cause was in shambles. (...) Indeed, for the Crown this destruction of militant liberalism was necessary for the advancement of liberal reforms in Italy. Change could and would only come from above - the lesson had surely been learned, and the leash on the reformists could be loosened. (...)
The tumult in Italy did not go unnoticed beyond its borders. The Hungarian civil war had de facto ended in January with the fall of Budapest to Communist Red Guards, but fear of Italian reprisal had kept the Hungarians from touching Italian business interests within Hungary. With the 1910 Risings, this last obstacle was removed. The Hungarian Communists moved ahead with a takeover and nationalization of foreign companies and deported indignant Italian businessmen en masse. (...)
Even after the dust had settled in Italy, nothing stronger than formal censure and economic sanctions targeted the new Hungarian regime. The Hungarian Revolution thus continued the collapse of the Continental System. (...)
The broader crisis of liberalism and the seemingly unstoppable rise of global communism sparked another reaction. Men and women around the world were seeking for answers to the questions of their age. They could not swallow the pampered idealism of the liberals, which had proven its weakness time and time again, nor could they accept the class divisionism of socialism. A third way would have to be forged. (...)
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) Everyday life in post-1910 Italy changed in many, often subtle ways. The forces of reaction began to modernize the tools of their control. The political police grew tenfold from 1910 to 1914 in both numbers and funding. Foreign experts were brought in to train officers in subversion, infiltration and terror as tools of law enforcement, fundamentally shifting the nature of policing in Italy. Italy's first modern secret police was born. (...) An atmosphere of conspiracy and paranoia fermented in the nation, with informants and spies expected on every corner. Neighbors and even family could become objects of intense distrust. Revolutionary Socialist groups and unions were broken up and their leaders arrested, inspiring a counter-evolution of secrecy. This 'age of the conspiracy' has been plenty depicted in popular media, but a non-sensationalist investigation remains incomplete. (...)
The Colombian Revolution of 1911 brought new overseas concerns. The South American nation bordered the Italian crown colony of Nicaragua in Central America, its sole remaining holding in the New World. The governor's office pleaded with additional forces to reinforce the border in case of Communist invasion or revolutionary movement at home. These fears were likely largely unfounded: the Colombian socialist project was unsteady from the start and native support for revolutionary socialism was non-existent in the undeveloped colony state. The United States occupation of the Panama Canal Zone effectively prevented any feasible offensive war in the region regardless.
Nationalist opposition by locals - who were a colorful mixture of Italian, Sorbian and native heritages - was on the rise, but this scarcely concerned officials in Firenze who considered Nicaraguans 'overseas Italians'. The independence movement styled themselves 'Costa Riccans' instead of Nicaraguans to distance themselves from the colonial state. (...)
The Communist regime in Gelre proved just as unable to prevent national humiliations as the liberal one preceding it. Citing atrocities by Communist forces in ethnic German territories of Gelre, the German Federation invaded once more in 1914. German unification was progressing, but Münich knew very well that sooner or later conflict against Italy was coming if they intended to truly complete the task before them. Anti-Italian sentiments in the Federation were strong in this period, bolstered by the brutal repression of the liberal-democratic uprisings of 1910. (...)
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) The Serbian experiment veered from disaster to disaster. The rural revolts had proven beyond the Party to contain. The underestimated and disdained rural proletariat had gone over to the enemy, while the urban workers resented new restrictions on the power of the councils. (...) The purge of the royal officer corps had been thorough, but the Red Guards could not provide equal talent to replace the men imprisoned and executed. (...) In June 1916, the important political prison at Uzice was overrun by peasant militias, who released a great many imprisoned 'reactionaries' and 'class traitors' within - experienced and well-motivated military men who would go on to form the core of the White Serbian army. (...)
By Spring 1918, the Civil War was over. The Red government had fallen, its last-minute reforms coming too late to make any difference to its fate. White Terror devastated the heartlands of the Red cause. (...) Government negotiations ended in the compromise formation of a bourgeois Republic. Conflicts with the conservative military establishment crippled the ability of the new Serbian state to govern. (...) In September 1918, the Hungarian Soviet Republic declared that it would no longer sit and watch White Terror murder their fellow workers in Serbia. War was declared and the powerful Hungarian Red Army marched over the border. A divided bourgeois Serbia with its smaller forces moved to repel the invaders. (...)
The Hungarian victory and occupation of northern Serbia was finalized in March 1920, with the surrender of the Serbian government. Now the ranks of international socialism could only stare in shock. Rather than restore the 'fraternal socialist republic' the Hungarians had claimed to go to war for, the Hungarian Supreme Soviet agreed to terms with Serbia where the ethnic Magyar northern territories of Serbia would be ceded to Hungary, with no further interference in 'internal Serbian affairs'. In essence, the grand promise of renewed liberation was tossed away for a nationalist landgrab. (...) The Serbian workers would never forgive this perceived betrayal. (...) For the socialist cause, this was embarrassing proof that the scourge of selfish nationalism could not so easily be removed from even a revolutionary state. (...)
The Internationale faced another conundrum in April 1919 with the announcement of the Seventh Olympic Games in Italy. Could Socialist states engage in such nationalist contests, especially on the soil of a nation they were avowed enemies of? It was unclear whether they would even be allowed to participate - indeed, for nations such as Colombia and Norway, exiled white governments were invited as the 'legitimate' representatives of their peoples. In the end, the Internationale agreed to form an opposing athletic contest in similar vein, the Spartakiad, open to workers around the world. The first Spartakiad - often described as 'the Shadow Olympics' - was held in 1921 in Oslo, with representatives from thirteen nations; the proletarian states of Hungary, Norway, Gelre, Seville, Alarcon, Colombia, Chile, Buenos Aires, Aotearoa and Ceylon, as well as teams from the social democrat-governed nations of Denmark, Croatia and Pagarruyung. A group of anarchist athletes also participated under their own flag. Further athletes joined as independents from nations and peoples around the globe for a truly international contest. (...)
The First Spartakiad ended as a success, for the most part. New records were made, though they are hopelessly modest when compared to modern equivalents. Hungary emerged as the most successful participating nation, a feat attributed in the local press to the 'rationalized and scientific Socialist training regimes' of their athletes. The anarchist and internationalist teams took the second-most medals when counted as a whole. Aotearoa emerged as an unlikely third; the small Oceanic nation had the benefit of decades of peaceful growth and widespread public enthusiasm for the Spartakiad to explain the general high performance of their team. (...)
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) The Italian speculative bubble burst in June 1919. The economy, barely recovered from its wartime exertions, promptly went into a nosedive. The Florentine Exchange convulsed in outbursts of panic as crashing prices prompted frenzies of selling. Fisticuffs broke out in the Exchange hall itself, necessitating police intervention. (...) As financial panics went, it was far from the worst of the period, but it was certainly the most significant. The government, as always, stepped in to take on the cost - and found out it simply could not afford to do so any longer.
The minutes of the emergency government meeting on June 28 reveal a startling picture. The state treasury had been hemorrhaging money since the beginning of the Great War, a tendency only made worse with the brute-force subsidization of industries after the conflict. A review of the Financial Ministry's reports shows that the unprofitability of many Italian industries was well known long before 1919. However, the King and his closest ministers deemed these economic concerns secondary; first and foremost, the state had to consider what would become of millions of Italian industrial laborers should these factories be allowed to close down. The turbulent nation simply could not bear a mass unemployment crisis and the radicalization it might set off.
It was a disaster which had only grown worse with every delay and half-measure. Now the buck could no longer be passed forward. Estimates showed impending bankruptcy for the state unless the course was turned at once. (...) The radical changes thought necessary were not ones that the ruling government could stomach. The di Verona cabinet offered its resignation on June 30, and the King accepted.
One could call the government of July 1919 the most liberal to ever take power in Italy. Headed by Count Francesco di Modrone, a moderate reformist liberal, it was thrust into power with the mandate of both stopping the economic crisis and quelling unrest among the masses. While it could not hope for success in respect to a constitution or representative assemblies, the new ministers were given practically free rein with economic, religious, administrative and social policy.
The first strike was at discriminatory laws and practices within the government and the military, swinging the gates wide for Catholic and Muslim applicants who had previously been allowed almost no opportunities for advancement. Citizenship of Italy and its legal guarantees was extended to millions who had before lacked the language skills or literacy to enjoy them. A thorough purge of the military began with the aim of removing 'brutish and backwards' practices of corporeal punishment and disciplinary hazing from the Army and Navy. The military budget was slashed into a fraction of its former self, most significantly by dismissing dozens of surplus officers from the payrolls where they'd lingered without any concrete duties since the War.
Some of the wildest hopes of the liberal cause were realized only 9 years after the failing of the 1910 Risings. But of course, the political system would remain just as absolutist as it had always been. (...) These reforms pale in comparison to the total about-face in economic policy overseen by the di Modrone cabinet. Starting from July 1919, the government withdrew all subsidies to unprofitable fields of industry and began privatizing the vast majority of all state-operated factories. Industrial subsidies had grown to be the largest single expense of the Italian national budget. Now, in one terrible swoop, the wealth stopped flowing out. The intent was to crash-restart the Italian economy according to liberal principles of free laissez faire enterprise.
(...) Entire fields of industry collapsed overnight. Managers and state executives floundered, baffled by the new reality they found themselves in. For decades they had run their factories with little care for profits or efficiency - now they were faced with the impossible task of meeting the standards of the market instead. While the ruined factories would go on to be replaced by others in more profitable industries, by and by, this was scarce consolation for the millions of working men and women thrown out to the wolves. The single greatest wave of unemployment in Italian history was about to begin. (...)
Excerpts from 'Black Hundreds: the Birth of Fascism in the 20th Century', written by Hans Brenner (Münich: 1977)
(...) It would be incorrect to characterize the emerging fascist sphere as something resting primarily upon the backs of radicalized veterans. Indeed, much of the Arditi street-level membership in particular was a generation removed from the scarred and traumatized men of the Great War. It was those who had been just too young to enlist or who had avoided the draft due to health or workplace exemptions who now flocked to its banners. Certainly the fascist parties and gangs held a greater appeal for them than it would have for their pre-War elders; Italy had left behind its century of prosperity and was now tumbling headlong into the abyss, at least if one asked the populist right-wing papers. (...) Mass unemployment and bleak prospects made for restless souls. An experience of having missed out on the glorious test of the War united these youths: they could not prove their manhood as their elder brothers and cousins had, nor could they show their worth in the often-boisterous masculine arena of the factory floor, so they leapt at the chance to enter the militant and active life of the Italian fascists instead.
(...) That is not to say war veterans did not make up a significant faction of the Arditi. The very name of the organization referenced Italian elite shock infantry of the Great War. Higher echelons of the party organization were almost solely junior officers and ambitious soldiers left causeless by demobilization. The ex-soldier population was divided between many other groups, however; they were courted in turn by militant socialists and anarchists, traditional conservatives and minority separatist groups all the same.
True success only lay in their ability to mobilize Italian society outside of the veteran masses, however. (...) By now the Arditi, which was by 1919 the largest fascist organization in Italy, had found a guiding vision of sorts, a rudimentary set of shared ideals and doctrinal points. These included the glorification of youth, a love of futurism and technology and a rejection of tradition, a belief in the necessity of state-practiced eugenics and racialism, militant atheism, extreme nationalism and social darwinism, and devotion to the 'state as legionnaire' - the nation imagined as a disciplined soldier with a ruthless clarity of vision and the submission of individuals to operate as part of this 'machine'. In practice much of this esoteric and highly conceptual doctrine manifested on the street level as little more than base racism and arbitrary acts of violence by member youths. (...)
One should not overstate the success of the fascists in this period. The chaos of liberalization and the labor crisis played far more into the hands of the extreme Left, whose numbers swelled by millions in the shock of 1919. Social democracy faced a crisis as a result. The 1910 Risings had not been able to threaten the Throne, and now the last hopes of gradual, peaceful social reform appeared crushed. With all the efforts of the moderates seemingly ruined overnight by the whim of the King, there was nothing that could be done to counter the accusations and promises of the Revolutionary Socialists. With reactionary governments falling left and right around the world, the time for reformism was surely past. Everywhere a drive to act and move faster seemed to be overtaking the people. (...)
The right and the left thus battled for the hearts and minds of the Italian masses. Industrial workers generally followed the Socialist banner, though in some areas conservative unions offered their beds to the Arditi and regional equivalents. Sailors and soldiers made for a more divided audience; leaders on both sides rightfully concerned themselves with securing the loyalty of the military, or else coming up with the means to defeat it in battle. The loyalty of much of the Royal Army to the King and the State had led to the defeat of the 1910 Risings and past, abortive attempts at revolution such as the Cogni plot. (...)
The new battleground now became the countryside. Generally conservative, rural Italians often viewed these radical movements with distrust. In the 1910s, the relaxed press code allowed for articles to be published on the dangers of agricultural work and the dismal fate of injured agrarian workers in the absence of state aid. Calls for a pension system and modern state-sponsored healthcare came from socialists and fascists alike in the papers. The Great War had brought millions of Italians into the sphere of the Royal Aid, the system of 'marching physicians' which offered state healthcare to all soldiers, veterans and their dependents. Unfortunately, the system had not received the necessary funding to accompany this vast expansion. Indeed, it was funded through the military budget, and the general staff rarely made it a priority when it came to their budget of the year. (...) In practice only those with the best connections and greatest bribes could secure the services of these state physicians. (...)
(...) The widespread coverage of these issues sparked unrest in rural Italy. In the face of tepid government response, farmers and agrarian laborers turned their ears towards the agitators of the left and the right, and they did so en masse. Landless tenant farmers and hired, nomadic laborers in particular experienced an awakening in class consciousness. Unions of agricultural workers grew in membership by leaps and bounds - as did organizations such as the Arditi, who promised a lifestyle of pride and self-reliance once more after years of exploited toil and alienation. (...)
The rise of labor did not go unnoticed in the high halls of Firenze. Trade unions were already illegal, but this ban had been selectively enforced. The new government renewed suppression efforts against organized labor and tacitly lended its support to the many local union-busting campaigns by industrialists and landowners. The Arditi were found to be an useful tool for these purposes. Rather than risk deploying potentially left-sympathizing Army units and waste government revenues on crackdowns, the Crown could simply encourage the vigilantism of the Fascist underground. (...) Brutal street battles and atrocities were common in these years as the Arditi and their regional counterparts assaulted Socialist strongholds where they could. Paramilitary forces were formed in response by unions and the left-wing parties. (...)
The Revolutionary Socialist coalition had by 1920 developed into two competing factions. The first followed the example set by the Communist parties of South America and the Balkans. The struggles and losses of this battlefield period had convinced this centralist wing that Italy was hopelessly infested by reactionaries and fascists, and that this rot would need to be excised from the marrow by the disciplined rule of a vanguard party elite; a proletarian dictatorship which was to use any means necessary to destroy the remnants of the bourgeois-aristocratic societal order. The Party and the State would seize total control over all aspects of the nation, so as to best put it on the path of a Communist society. Factionalism and internal disputes could not be tolerated; discussion could be held within the Party to find the right course forward, but all Party organs and members would then submit to its decision and see it to the end. (...)
Against this centralist doctrine arose a faction of libertarian socialists, syndicalists and anarcho-socialists, for whom the principles of uninterrupted democracy at every level were sacred. For them, political parties were inherently suspect and power could not be trusted in the hands of a 'vanguardist' few. The state that would follow the Revolution would be stripped to its bare minimum - replaced by the nested structures of democratic councils or empowered unions. Only through a total awakening of the proletariat, which could not be forced by heavy-handed state measures, would the future be won. Dynamism and anti-bureaucratization were necessary - the Revolution would need to always be reinventing itself. This faction was in the end far less unified than its rival, but with a far greater influence over the countryside where it spread through the preaching of radical Waldensian Socialist priests. This unlikely alliance certainly helps understand its prominent hopes for a 'final reformation of the Church' and incorporation as part of a socialist society. (...)
In 1921, this split was made official with the formation of the Partito Comunista Italiano, the voice of the former faction, and the reluctant creation of the opposing Fronte Socialista di Unita, which emphatically refused the label of a political party and indeed struggled to maintain internal coherency. The Revolutionary cause now competed within itself for support, though for now disagreements remained on the level of acerbic articles and vindictive debates. (...)
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) Italian influence in the Netherlands waned in the late 1910s. The monarchy in the Netherlands had undertaken a series of liberalizing reforms and established a parliamentary system in 1916, though the King still retained strong executive powers. The Dutch parliament however was sharply critical of Italy and its reactionary politics. Perhaps more critically, observers in the Netherlands were uneasy with the apparent unwillingness of Italy to maintain the post-war system it had helped create. How could the Netherlands continue to put their faith in such an ally?
Germany presented both a potential ally and a threat. As a neighbor - as of the most recent Gelrean war - it appeared to be a more natural ally to the Dutch than distant Italy. However, the Kingdom governed ethnic German territories and many Dutch politicians were rightfully suspicious of German motives in seeking to pull the Netherlands away from its strongest ally, Italy. (...) All in all, Italo-Dutch relations were growing increasingly fragile. (...)
The anti-war di Modrone government received the unpleasant task of planning and overseeing further investments into the Italian Army. The development of new, larger battleships - called dreadnoughts - necessitated investments into the Navy, which proved tremendously expensive to the national budget. Fortunately, state revenues had rebounded after discarding the weight of the bloated industrial subsidies. Di Modrone and his allies would certainly have found better use for this wealth than military spending, but they could not go against their sovereign. (...) To cut costs, the majority of new regimental foundings and military investments were given to the Colonial Office to handle. Tens of thousands of new Askari forces were raised up for the security of the colonies, for the first time led by local elites rather than white Italian officers. (...)
The opening of the 1920 Olympics in Rome provided an opportunity for Italy to showcase its greatness. Vast pavilions were constructed around the new Olympic Village to display Italian riches and technological developments. The Righi telephone became the defining symbol of the Olympics, a concrete example of the more interconnected world and Italy's modernity. At the same time, military forces guarded the entire area against incursions by homeless and unemployed workers living in tent cities outside the city. This division did not go unnoticed by foreign press, but most reporters were blinded by the sheer wealth and sophistication on display where they were meant to see it. (...) The same certainly applied for many Italians. The liberal winds encouraged carnivalism and festivities after years of discipline and austerity; but while the bourgeois classes danced and drank the night away, the foundation of the nation was rotting away. (...)
Here's another case in which some of my screenshots mysteriously did not materialize. The affected period was 1912 to 1917; nothing very spectacular happened according to my notes, but very annoying.
(...) That there was a crisis is undeniable. It was a crisis of the jacobin cause; of liberal democratic internationalism; of revolutionary liberalism as a whole. The destructive rise of Communism around the world was a bitter pill to swallow for the veterans of the jacobinist struggle. Their gentlemen's clubs and secret societies could not compete in numbers or appeal with the Left. Senseless devotion to reformism within absolutist systems of government had sapped the revolutionary potential of these parties. The popular masses they might have mobilized had been subverted and co-opted by the extremists of the Left. (...)
In Italy, the last desperate gasp of the old guard of Italian jacobins - the so-called Radical Republicans - came in 1910. This revolutionary liberal faction was led by the secret society of the Carbonari, a comfortably middle-to-upper-class institution with elaborate occult-esoteric practices and high-minded ideals. (...) Its popular support came mainly from the Napoli-based Masaniellist organizations, which owed their success to deep-seated regionalist pride and long history of republicanism in the South, the heritage of the failed 1640 Neapolitan Republic. These populist-liberal organizations had off-shoots in most major cities of Italy. (...) In the colonies, educated elites also supported the revolutionary liberal cause in the hopes that it would win their homelands representation in Firenze. (...)
The 1910 Risings began with anti-war riots in February 1910 in northern cities. Italian support of Sorbia in the Sorb-Gelrean War of 1910 had been unpopular and fears of renewed conscription now sent thousands into the streets. Composed largely of students and lower middle-class activists, these demonstrators demanded an end to absolutist rule: a constitution, universal suffrage, an elected senate, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech, expression and religion, guarantees to the rights of property, and reform of the military to cleanse it of 'causeless tyranny and draconian justice'. (...) The brutal government crackdown of February 15 sparked even wider demonstrations in previously unaffected cities. The Republicans saw their chance to act. The long-neglected weapon stores and bomb-making depots were opened back up as thousands of fervent jacobins took to the streets. (...)
Naples inevitably became the revolutionary heartland. The republicans framed their revolt in nationalist terms, which won them broad popular support in the South. Resentment at 'Northern Tyranny' had always fueled unrest in the region, now more than ever. Mechanization and commercialization of agriculture had caused widespread unemployment and poverty in the largely agrarian South. Naples itself was an industrial center, but one which had resisted the siren song of the extreme Left and instead largely supported the Italian Social Democrats. The Rising in Naples thus saw an alliance of liberal republicans and social democrats. The Revolutionary Socialists, on the other hand, were considered just as much an enemy as the tyrannical state. There would be no support from the communists for the Risings.
(...) The New Republican Army swelled to nearly 65,000 men in February-March 1910. They began extending their control over the city and its environs. Leaders in the city itself declared 'the Second Neapolitan Republic' on March 4th. With news of uprisings across the nation, the success of the revolution appeared only a few steps away.(...)
The illusion could not be maintained. The Risings had been small and fragmented in the North. The Army failed to manifest any liberal sympathies. Indeed, it appears to have leapt at the chance to crush the rebel forces. Brutal repression and state terror followed in the wake of republican defeats. (...) On March 10th, the loyalist III. Army swept into Naples and engaged the New Republican Army. Now the obsolete armaments and poor organization of the republican forces was made evident. (...) The surrender of the rebel command did not end the bloodshed. Executions of suspected republicans continued for over a week, with a death toll of at least 80,000 people. (...)
In mid-March, the Risings were over. Colonial disturbances continued until May, but only to meet similar ends. The liberal revolutionary cause was in shambles. (...) Indeed, for the Crown this destruction of militant liberalism was necessary for the advancement of liberal reforms in Italy. Change could and would only come from above - the lesson had surely been learned, and the leash on the reformists could be loosened. (...)
The tumult in Italy did not go unnoticed beyond its borders. The Hungarian civil war had de facto ended in January with the fall of Budapest to Communist Red Guards, but fear of Italian reprisal had kept the Hungarians from touching Italian business interests within Hungary. With the 1910 Risings, this last obstacle was removed. The Hungarian Communists moved ahead with a takeover and nationalization of foreign companies and deported indignant Italian businessmen en masse. (...)
Even after the dust had settled in Italy, nothing stronger than formal censure and economic sanctions targeted the new Hungarian regime. The Hungarian Revolution thus continued the collapse of the Continental System. (...)
The broader crisis of liberalism and the seemingly unstoppable rise of global communism sparked another reaction. Men and women around the world were seeking for answers to the questions of their age. They could not swallow the pampered idealism of the liberals, which had proven its weakness time and time again, nor could they accept the class divisionism of socialism. A third way would have to be forged. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) Everyday life in post-1910 Italy changed in many, often subtle ways. The forces of reaction began to modernize the tools of their control. The political police grew tenfold from 1910 to 1914 in both numbers and funding. Foreign experts were brought in to train officers in subversion, infiltration and terror as tools of law enforcement, fundamentally shifting the nature of policing in Italy. Italy's first modern secret police was born. (...) An atmosphere of conspiracy and paranoia fermented in the nation, with informants and spies expected on every corner. Neighbors and even family could become objects of intense distrust. Revolutionary Socialist groups and unions were broken up and their leaders arrested, inspiring a counter-evolution of secrecy. This 'age of the conspiracy' has been plenty depicted in popular media, but a non-sensationalist investigation remains incomplete. (...)
The Colombian Revolution of 1911 brought new overseas concerns. The South American nation bordered the Italian crown colony of Nicaragua in Central America, its sole remaining holding in the New World. The governor's office pleaded with additional forces to reinforce the border in case of Communist invasion or revolutionary movement at home. These fears were likely largely unfounded: the Colombian socialist project was unsteady from the start and native support for revolutionary socialism was non-existent in the undeveloped colony state. The United States occupation of the Panama Canal Zone effectively prevented any feasible offensive war in the region regardless.
Nationalist opposition by locals - who were a colorful mixture of Italian, Sorbian and native heritages - was on the rise, but this scarcely concerned officials in Firenze who considered Nicaraguans 'overseas Italians'. The independence movement styled themselves 'Costa Riccans' instead of Nicaraguans to distance themselves from the colonial state. (...)
The Communist regime in Gelre proved just as unable to prevent national humiliations as the liberal one preceding it. Citing atrocities by Communist forces in ethnic German territories of Gelre, the German Federation invaded once more in 1914. German unification was progressing, but Münich knew very well that sooner or later conflict against Italy was coming if they intended to truly complete the task before them. Anti-Italian sentiments in the Federation were strong in this period, bolstered by the brutal repression of the liberal-democratic uprisings of 1910. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Red Rose of Freedom: the Birth of Modern Socialism', written by Marco Francesco Scalzi (Monte Baldo: 1982)
(...) The Serbian experiment veered from disaster to disaster. The rural revolts had proven beyond the Party to contain. The underestimated and disdained rural proletariat had gone over to the enemy, while the urban workers resented new restrictions on the power of the councils. (...) The purge of the royal officer corps had been thorough, but the Red Guards could not provide equal talent to replace the men imprisoned and executed. (...) In June 1916, the important political prison at Uzice was overrun by peasant militias, who released a great many imprisoned 'reactionaries' and 'class traitors' within - experienced and well-motivated military men who would go on to form the core of the White Serbian army. (...)
By Spring 1918, the Civil War was over. The Red government had fallen, its last-minute reforms coming too late to make any difference to its fate. White Terror devastated the heartlands of the Red cause. (...) Government negotiations ended in the compromise formation of a bourgeois Republic. Conflicts with the conservative military establishment crippled the ability of the new Serbian state to govern. (...) In September 1918, the Hungarian Soviet Republic declared that it would no longer sit and watch White Terror murder their fellow workers in Serbia. War was declared and the powerful Hungarian Red Army marched over the border. A divided bourgeois Serbia with its smaller forces moved to repel the invaders. (...)
The Hungarian victory and occupation of northern Serbia was finalized in March 1920, with the surrender of the Serbian government. Now the ranks of international socialism could only stare in shock. Rather than restore the 'fraternal socialist republic' the Hungarians had claimed to go to war for, the Hungarian Supreme Soviet agreed to terms with Serbia where the ethnic Magyar northern territories of Serbia would be ceded to Hungary, with no further interference in 'internal Serbian affairs'. In essence, the grand promise of renewed liberation was tossed away for a nationalist landgrab. (...) The Serbian workers would never forgive this perceived betrayal. (...) For the socialist cause, this was embarrassing proof that the scourge of selfish nationalism could not so easily be removed from even a revolutionary state. (...)
The Internationale faced another conundrum in April 1919 with the announcement of the Seventh Olympic Games in Italy. Could Socialist states engage in such nationalist contests, especially on the soil of a nation they were avowed enemies of? It was unclear whether they would even be allowed to participate - indeed, for nations such as Colombia and Norway, exiled white governments were invited as the 'legitimate' representatives of their peoples. In the end, the Internationale agreed to form an opposing athletic contest in similar vein, the Spartakiad, open to workers around the world. The first Spartakiad - often described as 'the Shadow Olympics' - was held in 1921 in Oslo, with representatives from thirteen nations; the proletarian states of Hungary, Norway, Gelre, Seville, Alarcon, Colombia, Chile, Buenos Aires, Aotearoa and Ceylon, as well as teams from the social democrat-governed nations of Denmark, Croatia and Pagarruyung. A group of anarchist athletes also participated under their own flag. Further athletes joined as independents from nations and peoples around the globe for a truly international contest. (...)
The First Spartakiad ended as a success, for the most part. New records were made, though they are hopelessly modest when compared to modern equivalents. Hungary emerged as the most successful participating nation, a feat attributed in the local press to the 'rationalized and scientific Socialist training regimes' of their athletes. The anarchist and internationalist teams took the second-most medals when counted as a whole. Aotearoa emerged as an unlikely third; the small Oceanic nation had the benefit of decades of peaceful growth and widespread public enthusiasm for the Spartakiad to explain the general high performance of their team. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) The Italian speculative bubble burst in June 1919. The economy, barely recovered from its wartime exertions, promptly went into a nosedive. The Florentine Exchange convulsed in outbursts of panic as crashing prices prompted frenzies of selling. Fisticuffs broke out in the Exchange hall itself, necessitating police intervention. (...) As financial panics went, it was far from the worst of the period, but it was certainly the most significant. The government, as always, stepped in to take on the cost - and found out it simply could not afford to do so any longer.
The minutes of the emergency government meeting on June 28 reveal a startling picture. The state treasury had been hemorrhaging money since the beginning of the Great War, a tendency only made worse with the brute-force subsidization of industries after the conflict. A review of the Financial Ministry's reports shows that the unprofitability of many Italian industries was well known long before 1919. However, the King and his closest ministers deemed these economic concerns secondary; first and foremost, the state had to consider what would become of millions of Italian industrial laborers should these factories be allowed to close down. The turbulent nation simply could not bear a mass unemployment crisis and the radicalization it might set off.
It was a disaster which had only grown worse with every delay and half-measure. Now the buck could no longer be passed forward. Estimates showed impending bankruptcy for the state unless the course was turned at once. (...) The radical changes thought necessary were not ones that the ruling government could stomach. The di Verona cabinet offered its resignation on June 30, and the King accepted.
One could call the government of July 1919 the most liberal to ever take power in Italy. Headed by Count Francesco di Modrone, a moderate reformist liberal, it was thrust into power with the mandate of both stopping the economic crisis and quelling unrest among the masses. While it could not hope for success in respect to a constitution or representative assemblies, the new ministers were given practically free rein with economic, religious, administrative and social policy.
The first strike was at discriminatory laws and practices within the government and the military, swinging the gates wide for Catholic and Muslim applicants who had previously been allowed almost no opportunities for advancement. Citizenship of Italy and its legal guarantees was extended to millions who had before lacked the language skills or literacy to enjoy them. A thorough purge of the military began with the aim of removing 'brutish and backwards' practices of corporeal punishment and disciplinary hazing from the Army and Navy. The military budget was slashed into a fraction of its former self, most significantly by dismissing dozens of surplus officers from the payrolls where they'd lingered without any concrete duties since the War.
Some of the wildest hopes of the liberal cause were realized only 9 years after the failing of the 1910 Risings. But of course, the political system would remain just as absolutist as it had always been. (...) These reforms pale in comparison to the total about-face in economic policy overseen by the di Modrone cabinet. Starting from July 1919, the government withdrew all subsidies to unprofitable fields of industry and began privatizing the vast majority of all state-operated factories. Industrial subsidies had grown to be the largest single expense of the Italian national budget. Now, in one terrible swoop, the wealth stopped flowing out. The intent was to crash-restart the Italian economy according to liberal principles of free laissez faire enterprise.
(...) Entire fields of industry collapsed overnight. Managers and state executives floundered, baffled by the new reality they found themselves in. For decades they had run their factories with little care for profits or efficiency - now they were faced with the impossible task of meeting the standards of the market instead. While the ruined factories would go on to be replaced by others in more profitable industries, by and by, this was scarce consolation for the millions of working men and women thrown out to the wolves. The single greatest wave of unemployment in Italian history was about to begin. (...)
Excerpts from 'Black Hundreds: the Birth of Fascism in the 20th Century', written by Hans Brenner (Münich: 1977)
(...) It would be incorrect to characterize the emerging fascist sphere as something resting primarily upon the backs of radicalized veterans. Indeed, much of the Arditi street-level membership in particular was a generation removed from the scarred and traumatized men of the Great War. It was those who had been just too young to enlist or who had avoided the draft due to health or workplace exemptions who now flocked to its banners. Certainly the fascist parties and gangs held a greater appeal for them than it would have for their pre-War elders; Italy had left behind its century of prosperity and was now tumbling headlong into the abyss, at least if one asked the populist right-wing papers. (...) Mass unemployment and bleak prospects made for restless souls. An experience of having missed out on the glorious test of the War united these youths: they could not prove their manhood as their elder brothers and cousins had, nor could they show their worth in the often-boisterous masculine arena of the factory floor, so they leapt at the chance to enter the militant and active life of the Italian fascists instead.
(...) That is not to say war veterans did not make up a significant faction of the Arditi. The very name of the organization referenced Italian elite shock infantry of the Great War. Higher echelons of the party organization were almost solely junior officers and ambitious soldiers left causeless by demobilization. The ex-soldier population was divided between many other groups, however; they were courted in turn by militant socialists and anarchists, traditional conservatives and minority separatist groups all the same.
True success only lay in their ability to mobilize Italian society outside of the veteran masses, however. (...) By now the Arditi, which was by 1919 the largest fascist organization in Italy, had found a guiding vision of sorts, a rudimentary set of shared ideals and doctrinal points. These included the glorification of youth, a love of futurism and technology and a rejection of tradition, a belief in the necessity of state-practiced eugenics and racialism, militant atheism, extreme nationalism and social darwinism, and devotion to the 'state as legionnaire' - the nation imagined as a disciplined soldier with a ruthless clarity of vision and the submission of individuals to operate as part of this 'machine'. In practice much of this esoteric and highly conceptual doctrine manifested on the street level as little more than base racism and arbitrary acts of violence by member youths. (...)
One should not overstate the success of the fascists in this period. The chaos of liberalization and the labor crisis played far more into the hands of the extreme Left, whose numbers swelled by millions in the shock of 1919. Social democracy faced a crisis as a result. The 1910 Risings had not been able to threaten the Throne, and now the last hopes of gradual, peaceful social reform appeared crushed. With all the efforts of the moderates seemingly ruined overnight by the whim of the King, there was nothing that could be done to counter the accusations and promises of the Revolutionary Socialists. With reactionary governments falling left and right around the world, the time for reformism was surely past. Everywhere a drive to act and move faster seemed to be overtaking the people. (...)
The right and the left thus battled for the hearts and minds of the Italian masses. Industrial workers generally followed the Socialist banner, though in some areas conservative unions offered their beds to the Arditi and regional equivalents. Sailors and soldiers made for a more divided audience; leaders on both sides rightfully concerned themselves with securing the loyalty of the military, or else coming up with the means to defeat it in battle. The loyalty of much of the Royal Army to the King and the State had led to the defeat of the 1910 Risings and past, abortive attempts at revolution such as the Cogni plot. (...)
The new battleground now became the countryside. Generally conservative, rural Italians often viewed these radical movements with distrust. In the 1910s, the relaxed press code allowed for articles to be published on the dangers of agricultural work and the dismal fate of injured agrarian workers in the absence of state aid. Calls for a pension system and modern state-sponsored healthcare came from socialists and fascists alike in the papers. The Great War had brought millions of Italians into the sphere of the Royal Aid, the system of 'marching physicians' which offered state healthcare to all soldiers, veterans and their dependents. Unfortunately, the system had not received the necessary funding to accompany this vast expansion. Indeed, it was funded through the military budget, and the general staff rarely made it a priority when it came to their budget of the year. (...) In practice only those with the best connections and greatest bribes could secure the services of these state physicians. (...)
(...) The widespread coverage of these issues sparked unrest in rural Italy. In the face of tepid government response, farmers and agrarian laborers turned their ears towards the agitators of the left and the right, and they did so en masse. Landless tenant farmers and hired, nomadic laborers in particular experienced an awakening in class consciousness. Unions of agricultural workers grew in membership by leaps and bounds - as did organizations such as the Arditi, who promised a lifestyle of pride and self-reliance once more after years of exploited toil and alienation. (...)
The rise of labor did not go unnoticed in the high halls of Firenze. Trade unions were already illegal, but this ban had been selectively enforced. The new government renewed suppression efforts against organized labor and tacitly lended its support to the many local union-busting campaigns by industrialists and landowners. The Arditi were found to be an useful tool for these purposes. Rather than risk deploying potentially left-sympathizing Army units and waste government revenues on crackdowns, the Crown could simply encourage the vigilantism of the Fascist underground. (...) Brutal street battles and atrocities were common in these years as the Arditi and their regional counterparts assaulted Socialist strongholds where they could. Paramilitary forces were formed in response by unions and the left-wing parties. (...)
The Revolutionary Socialist coalition had by 1920 developed into two competing factions. The first followed the example set by the Communist parties of South America and the Balkans. The struggles and losses of this battlefield period had convinced this centralist wing that Italy was hopelessly infested by reactionaries and fascists, and that this rot would need to be excised from the marrow by the disciplined rule of a vanguard party elite; a proletarian dictatorship which was to use any means necessary to destroy the remnants of the bourgeois-aristocratic societal order. The Party and the State would seize total control over all aspects of the nation, so as to best put it on the path of a Communist society. Factionalism and internal disputes could not be tolerated; discussion could be held within the Party to find the right course forward, but all Party organs and members would then submit to its decision and see it to the end. (...)
Against this centralist doctrine arose a faction of libertarian socialists, syndicalists and anarcho-socialists, for whom the principles of uninterrupted democracy at every level were sacred. For them, political parties were inherently suspect and power could not be trusted in the hands of a 'vanguardist' few. The state that would follow the Revolution would be stripped to its bare minimum - replaced by the nested structures of democratic councils or empowered unions. Only through a total awakening of the proletariat, which could not be forced by heavy-handed state measures, would the future be won. Dynamism and anti-bureaucratization were necessary - the Revolution would need to always be reinventing itself. This faction was in the end far less unified than its rival, but with a far greater influence over the countryside where it spread through the preaching of radical Waldensian Socialist priests. This unlikely alliance certainly helps understand its prominent hopes for a 'final reformation of the Church' and incorporation as part of a socialist society. (...)
In 1921, this split was made official with the formation of the Partito Comunista Italiano, the voice of the former faction, and the reluctant creation of the opposing Fronte Socialista di Unita, which emphatically refused the label of a political party and indeed struggled to maintain internal coherency. The Revolutionary cause now competed within itself for support, though for now disagreements remained on the level of acerbic articles and vindictive debates. (...)
***
Excerpts from 'Italy and the World: the Italian Empire in the Modern Period', written by Hugo Fourier (Firenze: 1977)
(...) Italian influence in the Netherlands waned in the late 1910s. The monarchy in the Netherlands had undertaken a series of liberalizing reforms and established a parliamentary system in 1916, though the King still retained strong executive powers. The Dutch parliament however was sharply critical of Italy and its reactionary politics. Perhaps more critically, observers in the Netherlands were uneasy with the apparent unwillingness of Italy to maintain the post-war system it had helped create. How could the Netherlands continue to put their faith in such an ally?
Germany presented both a potential ally and a threat. As a neighbor - as of the most recent Gelrean war - it appeared to be a more natural ally to the Dutch than distant Italy. However, the Kingdom governed ethnic German territories and many Dutch politicians were rightfully suspicious of German motives in seeking to pull the Netherlands away from its strongest ally, Italy. (...) All in all, Italo-Dutch relations were growing increasingly fragile. (...)
The anti-war di Modrone government received the unpleasant task of planning and overseeing further investments into the Italian Army. The development of new, larger battleships - called dreadnoughts - necessitated investments into the Navy, which proved tremendously expensive to the national budget. Fortunately, state revenues had rebounded after discarding the weight of the bloated industrial subsidies. Di Modrone and his allies would certainly have found better use for this wealth than military spending, but they could not go against their sovereign. (...) To cut costs, the majority of new regimental foundings and military investments were given to the Colonial Office to handle. Tens of thousands of new Askari forces were raised up for the security of the colonies, for the first time led by local elites rather than white Italian officers. (...)
The opening of the 1920 Olympics in Rome provided an opportunity for Italy to showcase its greatness. Vast pavilions were constructed around the new Olympic Village to display Italian riches and technological developments. The Righi telephone became the defining symbol of the Olympics, a concrete example of the more interconnected world and Italy's modernity. At the same time, military forces guarded the entire area against incursions by homeless and unemployed workers living in tent cities outside the city. This division did not go unnoticed by foreign press, but most reporters were blinded by the sheer wealth and sophistication on display where they were meant to see it. (...) The same certainly applied for many Italians. The liberal winds encouraged carnivalism and festivities after years of discipline and austerity; but while the bourgeois classes danced and drank the night away, the foundation of the nation was rotting away. (...)
Here's another case in which some of my screenshots mysteriously did not materialize. The affected period was 1912 to 1917; nothing very spectacular happened according to my notes, but very annoying.
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Italy reminds more of otl XIXth century Russia than Italy itself. Fascist seems to be more National Socialist with all their eugenics, atheism and esoterism than Italian Fascists allies of the Church and dreamers of Rome we know from our history.
The 2nd thing, which is quite interesting, is sheer amount of Communist countries in the world. With their own "Spartakiadas" as an answer to Olympics (with no bans for any nation) they seems to live in different global culture, than the rest. Early XXth century tailors itself more as a Cold War scenario (but with no specific leaders yet) than pre World War II and quote on quote "communist culture" could become the dominant one in the end
The 2nd thing, which is quite interesting, is sheer amount of Communist countries in the world. With their own "Spartakiadas" as an answer to Olympics (with no bans for any nation) they seems to live in different global culture, than the rest. Early XXth century tailors itself more as a Cold War scenario (but with no specific leaders yet) than pre World War II and quote on quote "communist culture" could become the dominant one in the end
So many communist nations means there might be a chance of red world victory...hmm.
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I don't fully get the logic here. If this is what the King thought why did he appoint a PM who did basically the opposite of this?
TBH between the austerity and the radicalized military Italy is beginning to remind me of Imperial Japan more than anything else. Only difference is that Italy has what it wants, empire-wise.
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The King had upheld his policy for the last twenty years. It just couldn't be continued anymore - the country was on the verge of bankruptcy. Something had to change, and the King is one for dramatic acts. The recent extension of secret police and state repression also made him more confident that the radicalization brought by mass unemployment could be contained after all.
It was considered 'safe' to allow the liberals into power now when it hadn't been before, because their revolutionary wing appeared thoroughly defeated in the 1910 Risings - they seemed less dangerous and frightened back into line to the Crown. There's also the consideration that if the new liberal government fails to fix things, they're made to look even less appealing as a cause.
The King isn't stupid, though he certainly has his blindspots. The task of trying to hold together the absolutist system at this point demands strange-seeming choices from time to time.
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Finally caught up again! It looks as if Italy is soon to be plunged into chaos again.
Incidentally, are you planning to convert to HoI4? And if so, have you started doing so yet? There's lots of work happening on the converter, so I can recommend how to set things up to keep taking advantage.
Incidentally, are you planning to convert to HoI4? And if so, have you started doing so yet? There's lots of work happening on the converter, so I can recommend how to set things up to keep taking advantage.